Each container gathers a few quiet forms - a face, a boat, a bird, a village, an embrace - and asks you to hold them long enough that they become visible.
These works follow from The Hagiography of the Ordinary and Istanbul and Constantinople: A Personal Odyssey. Where those used icon, votive metal and silvered surface to honour ordinary lives, these move inward, into the chamber of the container. They are smaller, more private, more direct. They are not prints for a wall. They are things to approach closely - a drawer, a small shrine, a box of family papers opened on a quiet afternoon.
The container is not a new language for me. Years ago I made a work called The Trinity, three levels each holding a different state of being. Even then I was using the chamber to think through inherited belief and symbolic order, and the way a difficult idea becomes physical the moment it is contained. These recent pieces return to that structure with a sharper urgency. They turn on memory, inheritance, displacement, protection, and the long effort to put a scattered life back in order.
They return me, too, to my father's cupboards of phials, perfumes and chemicals - matter, care and a kind of alchemy, all kept in small vessels. And each one rests on a deep red velvet that was my mother's, one of the few things of hers I carry. It is not a backdrop. It is part of the work's material memory.
A hooded face is fixed into the lid; below it, a small silver boat waits in an empty hull. Nothing is loaded, nothing departs. The emptiness is the point - it gives absence a precise shape, a vessel you can hold in the hand, so that grief becomes something looked at calmly rather than something that overwhelms.
A silver eye weeps in the lid, and beneath it a darkened face waits half-submerged in shadow. The eye watches; the face endures and will not be fully recovered. This is a container for the people whose stories reach us broken - a grandparent half-remembered, a name without a photograph - and for the act of looking back without expecting an answer.
One panel is a grid of small silver faces, a household gathered cell by cell, a populace pressed into metal. The other holds a single embrace, large and close. The work keeps the archive and the caress in one chamber: the many who were lost and the one who can still be touched, neither cancelling the other.
A bird carries a small house through silver air, and the lid is engraved with the pattern of a carpet that lay in our home when I was a child. The house is not abandoned; it is lifted and taken on. The title is a promise of accompaniment rather than rescue - that what we love travels with us, even into exile.
A carved wooden hand cups the space beneath a small bird. It is the one work not sealed in a chamber, yet it speaks the same language: open palm, poised wing, the warmth and risk of making. It holds the strange seriousness of play - the way a child, and an artist, handles dangerous and tender things at once.
A reclining embrace is worked in silver, set opposite a pale, time-stained page. Body and text face each other across the hinge: desire and scripture, flesh and word, held together and left unexplained. The container lets tenderness stay serious, and lets body and spirit share one breath, as the old song always did.
A white village climbs into the air behind a white boat carrying two small figures. The icon has become a place - a luminous shore held inside dark wood, peopled by the dead and the departed who are still, somehow, arriving. The boat was modelled in Nomad; the rising city gathers earlier work, including Leather Gate, first cut as a lino image and later painted as a mural in Crete.
A small silver coffee cup stands raised on a turned wooden stand, lifted as a chalice is lifted. Domestic and ceremonial at once, bright against the dark, it asks the simplest and hardest question the series poses: of all that passes through our hands, what do we choose to keep close, and what do we raise into the light?
Two faces are kept together above a triangular silver talisman, pressed in an Armenian silversmith's workshop in Istanbul. Placed last, the work gathers everything the series has been reaching toward: protection, craftsmanship, and the long shared histories of those who live by a book - the hope that different inheritances can be held, with care, in the same hands.
The series stays open, but the discipline is clear. The container is not a format to repeat. It is a test - and each chamber must earn the thing it holds.