Clark Winter American, b. 27/10/1951

A window at night seen from outside, its panes lit from within by a flat white screen. Ranged along the sill and the shelf above it, a collection of small handmade things reduced to silhouette: a running figure, a machine with a spindle, a little building, a horse and rider, a figure with its arms flung wide, a pair of carved hands raised palm forward, something lying down. And hanging from a rail in the middle, a large heart, laced across with a bright zigzag of light.

None of it is identifiable and all of it is legible. Against a lit ground everything becomes an outline, and the outline of a running man reads as running whether it is two inches high or six feet. The window has turned a shelf of objects into a shadow theatre, and the objects have obliged by all facing the same way.

The heart is the one thing that is not flat black. Whatever it is made of has caught the light along a stitched or beaded line, so it glitters where everything else has gone solid, and it hangs slightly forward of the rest as though it had been put out on purpose. The rest of the window is a workshop. The heart is a sign. Winter photographed the whole arrangement from the dark side of the glass, which is the side you cannot get in from.