Heavy Enough to Fall, Light Enough to Rise - Doom Reimagined, 
​All Saints Church, Hastings, 2026

Curated by The Two Ians 'Doom Reimagined' required invited artists to respond to the Church's Mediaeval 'Doom' painting. Doom in this context means judgement and the soul's destiny when that fateful day arrives. The soul and its methodologically flawed study by Duncan Macdougall became the inspiration for my site-specific work. In 1907 the Massachusetts physician published the results of his experiment to establish the weight of the human soul. His conclusions were derived from observations of only six terminally ill patients, of whom just one appeared to support his hypothesis, registering a loss of 21.3 grams at the moment of death. Despite the study’s obvious limitations and lack of reproducibility, it nonetheless contributed to the widespread popularisation of the notion that the soul has physical mass.

Inspired by the little-known poem, ‘MacDougall's Prayer’ by the long-forgotten poet Bea Underwood (who by some almost unbelievable coincidence I'd encountered when working on my 'Box of Tricks' exhibition)  and informed by the former function of All Saints as the Fishermen’s Church, I constructed eighteen seashell-like vessels containing organic evocations (from seashore and land) of this purported '21 grams.' Installed on prayer books along the pews the works engaged spiritually with the church as a site of communal devotion offering a quiet meditation on human fragility and transience.