Yet, it should be stressed, it has also been part of an intelligent conversation, one to which Elwes has, in the most open-minded way, brought both his own knowledge as well as a desire to understand. The resulting paintings have not been driven by an overriding desire for a new form that the landscape might provide, but on the contrary have led to the discovery of the physical and spiritual correspondences between apparently diverse geographies. In this new series, derived from his latest journey to the astonishing cave complexes of Cappadocia in Central Turkey that gave home, and literally shelter and protection to the very earliest Christian communities, Elwes has produced paintings that bear close kinship with the work in his Storyline exhibition some seven years ago, which resulted from his travels among the American Pueblo Indians and in the East African Rift Valley.

This is immediately apparent above all in the dark hard edged rectangular openings that form such a dominant visual element of both groups of paintings and landscapes. On the one hand is the similarly punctuated surface, in the Cappadocian paintings representing the apertures hewn out of the rock itself, and marking the entrances to the countless literal spaces of the hermetic cells, chapels and tombs of the Early Christian fathers that honeycomb these extraordinary rock formations. On the other is the remarkable spiritual/geographical coincidence of their east facing entrances, so constructed by the Pueblo Indians that they might "watch the sun being reborn out of the earth's womb each day, bringing light and lifeback to the silent skin of the earth". Geologically remarkable in themselves, quite apart from these moving outward evidences of human belief that seem at times almost to float across their surfaces, they are too, as Elwes himself observes, visual metaphors, "suggestive both of individual lives and the connectedness of all Life".