Kynance by Tom Leighton is an ongoing digital art series which focusses on the extraordinary force of volcanic geology.

Kynance Cove was driven from the earth’s crust hundreds of millions of years ago. Created by a sequence of eruptions, the stacked cliffs and caves and tunnels of this rare landscape are an unusually dramatic testament to geological power.

Here we can see the evidence of molten crust and magma hurled through moving plates to the surface of the earth. These are unique layers of rock, exposed in places as a reptilian multi-coloured, scaly sheen which may give it the name Serpentine. The series of colour manipulated works are intended as a tribute to a sense of energy and intense beauty which you can experience in the cove even on the dullest day.

"I am finding that lockdown has, for me, forced a shift of focus. While environmental and political change accelerates at an unprecedented rate, I am now looking at transformations which happened over a very different timescale." — Tom Leighton

These images feature a terrain which would seem to be immutable, belying its turbulent and explosive past. The rock formations demonstrate a manifestation of the planet’s physical history: times of stability veined with turbulent change, fault lines which can be seen as a metaphor for our current human landscape.