The Pale Soft Palaces of Death
Installation; various media, 2026. With kind thanks to Allon Kaye (Graphics) and Antoine Bourruel (Animation). As part of the interim show at City & Guilds, London, 18–26 March 2026
The Pale Soft Palaces of Death, 2026 explores the themes of death, hauntology, longing and freedom and might be considered something of an embodied love letter. Composed of interrelated yet oblique elements the work assembles expressive material constellations through which intimate and abject experiences are distilled to generate forms of embodied knowledge. ‘To tell a story is always to invoke ghosts, to open a space through which something other returns.’ (Wolfreys, p. 3)
The work comes about through ‘unsaying, antitheses, paradoxes, exaggerations, and subtractions’. This site of truth is at first hidden which requires both strategy and faith, discipline and magic, and time, ‘If God is hidden, then God must be approached obliquely, negatively’, (Critchley, p.21). I am finding faith in a way of working that brings truth in its own time, and manifests in various materials.
Read: THE PALE SOFT PALACES OF DEATH / OR A LOVE LETTER TO DEATH
Wolfreys, J. (2002) Victorian hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the uncanny and literature. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Critchley, S. (2025) On mysticism: The experience of ecstasy. London: Profile Books.
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