I
Lost
A hooded face is set into the lid and a small silver boat rests in the base. The boat is empty, but it is not simply bleak. It gives absence a clear shape, so that looking becomes calmer and more precise.
Lost - a face and a boat, on the red velvet inherited from my mother.
New work after Hagiography and Istanbul
Vessels
Small box-works for seeing, holding, and making meaning.
These are containers for looking. Each box gathers a few forms - a face, a boat, a bird, an embrace - and lets them be thought through slowly. They are not only about loss. They are also about clarity, beauty, reflection, synthesis, dreaming and making.
00
A continuation, not a departureFrom votive metal to box, from image to chamber
This series follows from The Hagiography of the Ordinary and Istanbul and Constantinople: A Personal Odyssey. Where those projects used icon, votive, silver surface and historical memory, these new works move into the chamber of the box. They are smaller, more intimate, and more direct. A face, a boat, a bird, a cup, an embrace: each thing is held long enough to become visible.
The box is not a new format for me. Many years ago I made a work called The Trinity, arranged in three levels, each holding a different state of being. Even then, I was using the box to think through inherited belief, symbolic order, and the way difficult ideas become physical when they are contained. That older work survived for decades in my store room and in my teaching practice, where it became a way of opening difficult concepts with students.
These recent works return to that structure with a different urgency. They connect to memory, inheritance, displacement, protection and the attempt to order a scattered life. They also return me to my father’s cupboards of chemicals, phials and perfume-making materials, where matter, care and alchemy were held in small containers.
They are not prints for a wall. They are objects to approach closely: a drawer, a small shrine, a box of family papers. They allow complicated feelings to become briefly visible without making them simple.
Each box rests on a deep red velvet cloth inherited from my mother, one of the few things of hers passed to me. It is not a theatrical backdrop. It is part of the work’s material memory.
What a box is for
To see, to symbolise, to synthesise, to simplify, to dream.
An object can make a complicated feeling briefly clear.
01
The sequenceEach vessel gathered with its own views
II
Ancestor
A worked eye in the lid looks towards a darkened face below. The face is partly hidden rather than recovered. The box becomes a way of thinking about inheritance, recognition, and the people whose stories arrive incomplete.
III
Our Father's House
A grid of small figures fills one side like a gathered household, while a single embrace answers from the other. The work holds both archive and tenderness: many lives arranged, one human contact made visible.
IV
My Presence Will Go With You
A bird shelters or carries a small house in silver relief. The title suggests accompaniment rather than rescue. The vessel becomes a promise of movement, protection, and staying-with.
V
Playing with Fire
A carved wooden hand holds the space beneath a small bird. The work is not enclosed, but it belongs to the same language of vessels. It is about making, risk, warmth, transformation, and the strange seriousness of play.
VI
Song of Songs
A reclining embrace is worked in silver and held opposite a pale page. Affection, text, body and chamber are brought together without being explained away. The box lets tenderness remain serious.
VII
Imagined
An icon image in the lid faces a small silver holder in the base. The title is provisional, but useful for now: the work is about the invented chamber where devotion, memory and domestic objects meet.
VIII
What We Hold
A small silver coffee cup is raised on a wooden stand. It becomes a vessel for attention: bright, worked, domestic, and ceremonial at once. The object asks what we choose to keep close, and what is lifted into view.
IX
People of the Book
Two kept faces sit above a solid silver Ottoman talisman, pressed in an Armenian silversmith workshop in Istanbul. Placed last, the work gathers protection, craft, shared histories and the hope that different inheritances can be held together with care.
