Metaphysics is a book and a series of colour photographs made on board airplanes. There is an unreasonableness in our human desire for flight: we are itinerant featherless bipeds cocooned in reassuring cabin interiors supported by the mechanics of aerodynamics. In the beginning Kate Joyce photographed the aerial view out of the window, a cold, detached and mesmerising blueprint; over time she discovered a more intimate view within the aircraft, of bodies, sunlight, hands and drapery, a human organisation closer to a chrysalis than to the architecture of flight, and in this confinement, close to both birth and death, there is incredible light. She spent seven years, between 2012 and 2019, on more than fifty airplanes, coveting the window seat as a studio of constraints and looking for illuminated bodies in the strange limbo of airports and the loneliness of planes. The book is the companion monograph to a SITE Santa Fe exhibition and shows how static images can capture the passage of time, revealing fragments of its movement through light and space; the pictures are dark, with slivers of orange light along seat edges.