And, like the landscape of Mt. Kailash in Tibet which provided the inspiration for his last exhibition (Pilgrim, 1998 Art First), this is a landscape filled with visual reminders of belief. "The scenery of early Christendom lay all around us", Patrick Leigh Fermor observed of Cappadocia, although in its long abandoned and distinctly melancholy uninhabited present state this once populous landscape is not one of continuing belief but instead a potent reminder of an existence and belief largely lost, as our Western/Christian civilisation has become more complex and less innocent. This was very much part of what attracted and absorbed Elwes' attention. Also the strong sense, nonetheless, that the life and belief that existed in these peaks and valleys was always rooted firmly in the earth, a fact forcibly brought home to him one day when, walking by one of the streams that feed the lush valleys that once provided the hermits' livelihood, a strange clattering noise in the grass brought him to a group of rutting male tortoises, the descendants of those painted 1500 years earlier and still to be seen decorating cell and chapel walls alongside images of the cross and stars in the sky. As the artist observes, "even the doves stillcircle and return to innumerable dovecotes. The simple wonder of being at one with the earth, the sky, the rocks, the seasons, with all of life, has faded".

That sense he has of a faith deeply bound to the earth feels unfamiliar in the context of a Christian/Western belief that has, in the intervening period, intentionally distanced itself from what it sees as pagan, naturebound cults, and depicted the earth as of little or no importance spiritually. This tendency has had disastrous consequences, environmentally and emotionally for the human race as a whole as we simultaneously destroy the earth and lose our sense of place within it. For, as Paul Devereux has written in Revisioning the Earth, "Place is not passive. It interacts with our consciousness in a dynamic way. It contains its own memory of events and its own mythic nature, its 'genius loci' or spirit of place". It can bring things to the fore, into awareness, that were until then existing in the unconscious mind. Place can therefore illuminate us and provide mythic imaginings within us".