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Look at this work for ten seconds – what strikes you most? The river landscape, the smiling girl, or perhaps the abstract shapes in the foreground? Stephen Gill’s work requires time to sink in. By layering multiple negatives while printing photographs, a collage of different images results.

But another layer lies across the serene landscape and smiling girl: abstract shapes that resemble the things you see through a microscope. These traces are the result of objects that Gill deliberately places inside his camera, prior to taking photographs. In this way he attempts to create confusion in the scale relations between the different images. This unique approach emphasises the refined and disquieting beauty of Gill’s photography, in which every detail is cast in a new light, in surprising ways.