Cemetery (Vesica Series)

The Vesica painting series is inspired by Italian architect Carlo Scarpa’s use of archaic motifs in his contemporary design for the Brion Cemetery, San Vitale (1970-72). Scarpa inscribed a ‘vesica piscis’ (literally fish bladder) created by two intersecting circles cast into the concrete wall of the entrance to the Brion family burial compound. The logic of the motif draws on pagan traditions that imagine the vulva or womb-like shape of the Vesica as a threshold between heaven and earth, linking the immaterial and the material.

The Vesica paintings imagine the empty territory of the canvas as an analogous site filled with multiple layers of paint delineating shifting colour fields and abstract geometries that reference landscape, sky and horizon. Within this context the Vesica motif is dropped as a visceral anchor opening a threshold within the painting itself.