The Interior Castle, Santa Teresa de Avila
Santa Teresa de Ávila describes the soul as a radiant castle with many inner rooms, guiding us on a journey inward to encounter God at its centre. She teaches that true spiritual growth is rooted in humility, love, and self-knowledge, and that this path is open to everyone, making contemplative spirituality accessible beyond the walls of religious life.
Lectures on the Ten Oxherding Pictures
The lectures on the Ten Oxherding Pictures explored a classic Zen text that depicts the journey toward self-realization through ten symbolic images of seeking, finding, and returning with awareness. This work is important because it shows enlightenment not as escape, but as a return to ordinary life with clarity, compassion, and responsibility. Its images illustrate spiritual growth as a gradual, lived process, reminding us that awakening is not an endpoint but a way of being in the world.
This project focused on the version by Japanese Zen master Yumon Mamada, a visual and poetic teaching of the path toward self-realization. These ten images show the search for the “ox,” a metaphor for one’s true nature. While Mamada offers ten established images, my focus is on the text itself. Using natural language processing to study recurring words and themes, I then contemplate them as a form of meditation, allowing new imagery to emerge.
Fariduddin Attar’s Conference of the Birds
Fariduddin Attar’s Conference of the Birds is a Sufi masterpiece that tells the story of birds traveling in search of their true king, only to discover that what they seek lies within themselves. Through allegory and poetry, the text explores themes of ego, love, sacrifice, and spiritual awakening. It remains important because it presents the journey toward self-knowledge as collective and deeply personal, reminding us that transformation requires confronting our own limitations and illusions.
Experiential Translation Network (Commissioned Project)
The Experiential Translation Network symposiums examined how meaning changes as it moves through language, media, and collective dialogue. Using text data from its meetings, written exchanges, and seminars, I studied recurring words as evidence of how ideas shifted across the group. I then translated this data into a triptych painting, letting the language itself direct the visual choices in colour, form, and structure. The final work reflects the symposium’s process of transformation, showing how shared text can evolve into shared visual interpretation.