The Cave Installation

- The oldest sacred spaces are caves -

This work begins there - not as reference or homage, but as continuation. A walkable structure, white and neutral on the outside, with a single portal entrance. Cross the threshold and the world outside softens. Inside: geological walls of papier mache with Petri dishes embedded throughout, light pulsing slowly from within the surface itself. Earth, light, time.

The light doesn't illuminate the cave. It is the cave.

The experience moves from the rational to the embodied. The exterior asks nothing. The interior asks everything.

The portal geometry explored in ceramic - forms made in India

Not caves, but cave entrances. The threshold held in miniature.

The Precedent

In 2018, the Empyrean installation at All Hallows' Church, Lady Bay Arts Festival, proved the central principle at scale — that a work can create the conditions for encounter without prescribing what that encounter should be.

Light, sound and Petri dishes transformed a sacred space into something each visitor completed differently — birds in flight, cosmos, void, human figures in dance. The vicar described what happened as spontaneous symmetry breaking and invited the work to remain for a month.

The Cave Installation takes that encounter further. Not a church borrowed, but a cave built. The oldest container for the sacred, made new.