C.S. Lewis’s Desk Set: Site of Interior Landscapes
Karen L. Mulder
silver gelatin print
8" x 10"
2001

I have observed the slow process of redeeming C.S. Lewis’s home near Oxford, The Kilns, from its sadly neglected state. In 1999 and 2001 I spent several weeks photographing the rehabilitated house, with the aim of capturing the sense of presence there. Watching the light move through rooms that had been "loved" back into a state of grace resulted in some amazing visual dialogues between redemption and revelation—light—and mystery and the unknown. Lewis often appealed to the immediacy of the chromatic, dynamic values ranging between light and dark in his fictional works and apologetic essays. I see Lewis’s desk, reconstructed at The Kilns, as a template for his thoughts—the silent witness to many of his richest flights of imagination and logic, from Screwtape to Mere Christianity.