Salvation Mountain

Salvation Mountain rises from the sands of California's Imperial Valley like a technicolour volcano, erupting paint, dirt, and straw shaped into waterfalls, flowers, suns, and a towering red heart proclaiming: God Is Love. It's hard to explain the intensity. In the middle of nowhere, in the heat of the desert, under a sky so blue it looks like someone dialled up the saturation in Photoshop.

It was made by Leonard Knight. Born in Vermont in 1931, Leonard spent years roaming America with a homemade hot air balloon that never quite got off the ground. His goal? To carry a message across the sky: God is Love. Eventually, he landed in the desert. In 1984, just outside the off-grid community of Slab City, he began building a monument to his message out of concrete. When the first version collapsed in 1986, Leonard saw it as divine intervention. "I guess God wanted me to do it different," he said. So he did.

I cut slices of Leonard's colossal folk art cake with my camera. Everywhere it pointed was the outpouring of his belief, a collision of faith and creativity; I wanted to capture the outrageous beauty of it all. The vibration of colour that outshone the isolation of his obsession. These images are an attempt to calm the synesthetic overload.

It makes sense in hindsight. It's hard to resist outsiders who pour themselves into their art without expectation. Not for acclaim or markets, but because that's what they do. Leonard Knight spent half a lifetime sculpting and painting Salvation Mountain. No sponsors. No grants. Just his hands, brushes, thousands of gallons of donated paint, help from his friends in Slab City, and a message he believed in.

This is a tribute to his kind of devotion. To the handmade. The strange. The slightly miraculous. Sometimes the most powerful art comes from the edges, like Salvation Mountain, where belief and creativity collide.