"Kew Gardens is a magical place. It's not desperately accessible to me, living as I do in relatively remote corner of East Sussex, but whenever I make the effort to travel up to west London and spend the day there, I am never disappointed. I find myself invariably gravitating towards the smaller more intimate areas of the gardens; the waterlily house is one such location. A compact glazed structure with a circular pond spanning around 36 feet, which, amongst other attractions, is home to the most extraordinary Amazonian waterlilies. As it is almost impossible to convey their scale in a photographic image, I concentrated on juxtaposing their strong rounded forms with the pinpoints of light dancing on the seemingly unfathomable depths of the deep blue water. The thin green lines that anchor the huge leaves in the image are a consequence of moving the camera around as I blended the images together. Abstraction invites interpretation and to me these lines suggests gossamer threads mooring the extravagantly-curved greenness, reminiscent, almost, of two helium filled balloons, desperate to escape."  Valda Bailey