CURA.

This video was made at the end of lockdown after months spent looking through portals, watching the outside world from afar while immersed in animated worlds with my young daughters.

At the same time I was searching for books on icons – specifically from the period just before the naturalism of the Renaissance took hold. I was taken with the Byzantine idea that religious icons are not pictures or images – as any form of likeness was disputed – instead they are windows looking directly on to heaven, you are literally gazing into another realm via a channel of grace.

The iconography of saints dwelling in caves was the most appealing: hermits who had given up on real life and cast themselves into the wilderness to enable them, through the denial of the flesh, to come closer to the presence of the divine, to be spiritualised.

AII of this was in my head – part of my internal landscape – when one day, once restrictions were lifted, I went walking in Alexandra Park close to my house. AirPods in, listening to Judee Sills, the sun broke through the trees and I was suddenly completely overcome with the abundance of everything-all-at-once, so great it seemed to surpass my senses. As my phone was in my hand I recorded the experience as it happened.