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July 2011–I am making plans for an upcoming visit to Kaunas, Lithuania, to take part in the European Textiles Network Conference and the Kaunas International Biennial of Textiles, held together in September this year.  I am taking the work of 6 of my recent Year 3 students of the Crawford College of Art and Design in Cork for a special exhibition sponsored by TEXERE (Textile Education and Research in Europe)  of which I have been a member for many years.  I will also exhibit one of my own artworks in Kaunas, and speak to the ETN Assembly as part of a special session on Networking and Exchange.  I will highlight the textiles and exchange and outreach programmes at the Crawford.  I can’t wait for this intensive immersion in textiles culture!!!  I am so grateful to the Institute for sponsoring me through Erasmus funding!

May 2011:  My work will be featured in a new book published this month, FIBER ART TODAY, by Carol Russell; Schiffer Publishing in the U.S., available soon through Amazon. 

April 2011:  I am exhibiting new work, Belief (See Current work/new directions page) in Perceptions of Craft in Contemporary Fine Art, curated by Nuala O’Donovan for the Lavit Gallery, Cork, until 30 April.  In this work I am staining through stitching with acrylic on paper. . . .in this show I am also exhibiting Halo and Grace, works in glass/wire and gold leaf construction (can be seen in International exhibitions section of this site).

RE the Venice Biennale:  unfortunately Arte & Arte have funding difficulties and must postpone their involvement until the next Biennale.  But having been accepted as a Collateral Event they now know much more about the complex application and funding requirements. . . .I am excited to have been selected, and I am keeping in close contact with this ambitious organisation regarding a possible educational project. . .

October 2010:  Exciting news!  I have been invited by the Arte & Arte Association of Como, Italy, to exhibit in their collateral exhibition within the next Venice Biennale!  More news as this develops!

I am currently exhibiting a miniature piece in an exhibition entitled Genus Loci, organised by the Slovakian Artists Union,  in Galeria X, Bratislava, to which I have been invited to submit.  To talk about the spirit of Ireland I am using fragments of natural slate from my garden here in Kinsale, creating a circular island form within clear glass.  Images of this work can be found under Work: International Exhibits.

I was recently honoured to have been invited by the Japanese textile artist Asako Ishizaki to exhibit with her in Tokyo in  February/March 2010.  This exhibition, Session, curated by Sugane Hara,  paired 15 Japanese artists with selected international artists in sharing ideas, exploring creative methodology, in the development of  our work for this show.   Asako and I  have therefore come through a period of correspondence and image exchange, particularly in reference to our respective spiritual ethos and how this is reflected in our art practice.  We find that both of us struggle to embody the divine essence of nature, of matter, in our manipulation of glass, metal, paper, and fibre.  You can see an image of this work in Work: International Exhibits in this site.  (March 2011:  please pray for Sugane and her family and friends of Tokyo who are safe but bearing the worries of their nation in the aftermath of earthquake and tsunami!)

Click here for full details of past and upcoming exhibitions >

I was a very fortunate participant in this event, held at the Bildungszentrum Raiffeisenhof in Graz from 9-13 July of this year. I represented Ireland within a group of 12 textile artists spanning a wide range of disciplines, cultures, stages of career. It was a very successful event on many levels, with a high standard of organisation and representation.

For the benefit of TEXERE members I will offer an outline of its structure: Firstly, the mix of participants was very well chosen by the chief organiser, Prof. Renate Maak. Language problems were minimised by ensuring that each participant shared some common language with at least one other. English and German were the main operating languages, with a translator always on hand for group discussions. The 10 days were strictly organised, but always allowed space for personal needs and interests. We arrived on a Thursday to settle in; Friday was a day of sight-seeing and generally getting acquainted, with a morning tour around Graz, an afternoon bus tour of the Styrian wine region with a generous sampling of the wine; Saturday and Sunday we installed our exhibition within the Raiffeisenhof (each participant submitting a selection of works). The exhibition was opened formally and with great festivity on the Monday evening. From Monday through Friday mornings we each had a scheduled presentation of our work to the group, and sometimes to interested guests. This took the form usually of slides, but some artists brought videos and extra samples of work, of materials, and various catalogues to give an intensive focus and understanding. A few artists also provided slides of other textile artists from their countries. Afternoons of this week were spent in a group studio, working with our various materials and methods. Some artists responded directly to the space and situation with experimental samples; others brought their usual tools and materials to demonstrate their own way of working.
On Thursday of this week we hosted an open day to the public. Several dozen artists, teachers of art, students, etc. paid a fee to attend the morning presentations, a luncheon, and observe the studio session. Friday afternoon we packed the exhibition. Saturday we departed.

Textiles processes and approaches varied widely within our group. A strong grounding in classic structural processes such as woven tapestry and lace was evident in the artists from Eastern Europe. Andrew Schneider (Ukraine) works in complex woven tapestry featuring stylised pictorial or graphic themes rendered with sophisticated colour blends and twill overlays; Jiri Holek (Czech Republic) also weaves large-scale pictorial Gobelin but in a looser, playful, highly coloured weft composed of strips of cloth or plastics; and Iveta Mihalikova (Slovak Republic) employs a stitched lace structure in wire with accents of paper or burned plastic to create delicate traceries of organic, plant-like lingerie forms shaped to the female body. Meticulous wire work also featured in the concentric woven copper spheres of Jean Pierre Cogels (Belgium). He also exhibited subtle grids of dried teabags, and his slide talk revealed another more conceptual strand of enquiry using simple materials from nature or collections of functional materials in time-based, ephemeral works. Another artist exploring conceptual issues was Helmie van de Riet (The Netherlands) who uses a huge variety of materials in highly embellished, embroidered forms from the world of domestic design and fashion (tables, handbags) to convey many layers of meaning in attitudes and mythology surrounding the Virgin Mary. Lizzy Mayrl (Austria) works in large-scale, elemental, and highly symbolic felt forms referencing body/earth connections. Vito Capone (Italy) explores handmade paper in linear compositions of string and sticks held in wooden frames, dipped in pulp and dried. These varied units are joined in free-hanging panels, spare and elegant. He also exhibited denser paper works of layered pulp in book images embedded with fine threads and fibres, textured with among other methods, an electric drill! Delicate threads in free panels were also shown in the work of Dorit Berger (Germany) working in double-weave transparent blocks with insertions and interesting materials such as horsehair. The work of the two Korean artists, Ku Jeong Min and Cha So-Lim shared a strong sensibility for organic material (Korean paper fibre and wood) and a poetic, symbolic force. Ku Jeong Min exhibited work in repeated units of collaged handmade paper, with details of fragments of text, fibre, and tiny x-ray figures on plastic. One large piece was composed of joined translucent segments of these hung so that light could penetrate and convey the layers. Her other large work was composed of a large rectangular arrangement of label-sized paper units each affixed separately to the wall in a precise grid. Cha So-Lim works mainly in wood, embedding rough chunks of it with metal tracks cut from zippers that then emerge into woven structures. Small nails and other bits of metal further texture her wood surfaces; clear epoxy resin is also used to coat the wood and then emerge as pure cast resin extensions. My own contribution also used “hard” materials not typical to textiles. I exhibited two metre-square structures composed of small cut units of clear and stained glass and some stone, bound with wire into fabric structures, tightly pleated into relief compositions based on aspects of the Sacred Heart. Renate Maak, our organiser, participated as the 12th artist, representing a varied body of work ranging from experimental woven pieces through sensitive embroidery over photographic prints or the subtle natural stains of wine filters.

As fellow artists we shared our experiences in developing, exhibiting, and marketing our artwork. Quite a lot of the twelve also teach; it was interesting to compare curricula and methodologies with the different approaches of, say, the Korean or Slovakian systems. Many of the group had also experience in organising conferences or symposia in their own nations. Lizzy Mayrl was leaving just after the Graz Symposium to attend her own project in Central Asia, an exciting gathering of European felt artists with artists of the nomadic culture to travel and work together for several months.

Certainly this Symposium and others like it are vital in creating cultural links across textiles traditions and in promoting innovations across the textile art scene. Although we can easily now communicate by net, exchange images freely as well as words, nothing can replace real contact with process and material. For me the most significant benefit of Graz has been the human contact with other such different artists who yet share such a similar working language. It was enriching, supportive, and challenging to reveal one’s work amidst an audience of such insightful peers. Real friendships have resulted. It seems likely that for each of its 17 years the Graz Symposium has been generating many threads of continuing fertile contact between textile artists worldwide. This network is a tribute to the vision and drive of Renate Maak and her organising team.

As a maker my path is holistic, a unifying dialogue between my inner vision, inspiration, spirit—-and matter, the material reality of my chosen medium. I see it as engagement in a kind of alchemy, transforming or transfiguring basic matter, re-forming it to carry and express meaning. I see this need to make form as a gift, feel it as a hunger, and recognise it reborn over and over year by year in the young students I teach in the College of Art here in Cork.

My own art practise has always been intimately involved with my spiritual journey. My processes are rooted in textiles, binding and twisting together with wire many thousands of small cut units of glass or stone to make flexible ‘fabrics’ or sculptures. This is a very repetitive, meditative process, and I see it as analogous to my inner piecing and binding of insights. It feels and functions for me as a form of prayer, as a conscious enactment of worship. In fact, the painful working of sharp glass and wire often feels also like a kind of penance!

In my childhood in rural Appalachia, in the eastern mountains of the U.S., I was trained in the necessity and virtue of making meaningful objects. To spend time in making something well was to be rewarded with a meaningful object invested with oneself. I hold this connection between goodness, virtue—–and sincere craftsmanship, deep within me, allied to the kind of Aquinas view that beauty and goodness are also intrinsically linked. And I have long sought God through the experience of my senses, through the beauty of His created world, as St. Bonaventure described it, ‘knowing God through His footprints’. I gradually developed a trust in the making of art to help me articulate and advance my awareness of God. I came to understand my vocation as an offering up to God this art process imbued with my childhood sense of the virtue of making.

In 1986 this path brought me to Ireland, into what I hoped would prove a more suitable environment in which to explore a kind of essential Christianity. For many years I struggled to express my relationship with God, my search for a place to belong in my faith, through making artworks in many different materials and methods. In the year 2000 this search led me to be received into the Roman Catholic faith. Since then I have continued my search, but now from the inside, as it were, to explore this sense of belonging, and what it means to be a Catholic. My most recent solo exhibition was in 2002, in Cork’s Fenton Gallery, based on the physicality of spirituality through studies of Christ’s Passion. I witness to my faith in many international exhibitions and through artworks placed in churches as far apart as Helsinki, Finland, and Blanchardstown in Dublin.

I have also been active in contributing my ideas of art making as a language of faith to projects in my local parish in Kinsale, near Cork city. We have had several very successful exhibitions as part of recent Festivals of Faith. In these exhibitions we sought to invite responses from our parish, from other church groups, and the wider community to themes of faith, such as Light Within, or Living Water. This way of ‘inviting a response’ impressed and inspired, and surprised many people. It gave those committed to faith an opportunity to enjoy the virtuous experience of making something to offer up in praise and devotion to express their individual, personal insights. Many wonderful things happened through this. Many participants had never exhibited before. Some collaborated. It was empowering and gratifying for these people. But it also involved many in the community from outside the Church, creative people conscious of an inner spirit but suspicious of institutions. Here was a “safe space” as David Stanley calls it, for these artistic people to come into contact, to open dialogue with a welcoming Church. And then of course it was an enlightening and thought-provoking array of insights for the audience, many surprised by the range of approaches, the devotion, the depth of meaning. We presented these exhibitions as professionally as possible, with proper lighting and advertising, to honour and elevate them in the eyes of the community. In our second show we also included poetry and prose, and again brought together a very wide spread of voices, and of proximity to Church involvement. Overall these projects were certainly faith nourishing to many people on many levels in many ways.

From this experience I feel that there are many like me for whom this making process is a natural, comfortable language of faith. I would suggest that more of this invitation to express through creative means could nourish and promote our faith. Why not have artists–in-residence, or poets or musicians or dancers—in a faith community, to work particularly with adults who rarely have organised, supervised opportunities to express themselves creatively within the Church. In our parish we often have displays of children’s artwork from the local schools, but where is the adult expression? Perhaps these are happening, but in my 20 years in Ireland I have seen and heard about very few in local parishes. Rosemary Lindsay asserts that many have a ‘hunger for tools of spiritual craft’, and here is a ‘craft’ that is active, deeply satisfying to participants and can also operate to open dialogue.

I strongly believe that this ‘dearest freshness’ of Hopkins’s poem that is ‘deep down things’ must be brought up and out into dialogue in the way that creative processes can tap this wellspring of inspiration. This freshness will bring vibrancy, fertility into our worship, our community. I know that there is often a risk perceived in allowing personal expression, and that images can be more difficult to control than words. But I share the thinking of our late Pope John Paul, who said in his 1999 letter to artists,

 Every genuine inspiration, . . . contains some tremor of that ‘breath’ with which the Creator Spirit suffused the work of creation from the very beginning. Overseeing the mysterious laws governing the universe, the divine breath of the Creator Spirit reaches out to human genius and stirs its creative power. He touches it with a kind of inner illumination which brings together the sense of the good and the beautiful, and he awakens energies of mind and heart which enable it to conceive an idea and give it form in a work of art.

We must trust this creative spirit given by God. If this making activity could be grounded in prayer, and mindful of the context of our great Christian artistic heritage, then we should be able to trust its outcomes. The American theologian John Dillenberger says that art can have ‘unintentional consequences’ that can ‘generate new perspectives’. Can the Church open itself to these unintentional effects, to embrace within it new art that challenges, transforms?

We live in an image-laden world. The face that the Church turns to this jaded world should radiate the energy, the glorious light of the living Christ. It should nurture creativity and new forms of art, music, literature, and architecture, instead of relying on the comfort zone of mass-produced reproductions from a golden past. This is my vision as an artist and a Christian: that our Church should ally itself once again with the heights of creative activity, open to the divinity activating itself through the noblest expressions of humanity. This is my prayer as I work in my studio: to be invited, to be involved, to find ways to renew that once intimate and fruitful relationship between a living art and the Church. And I thank God for the potential I see generating through your forum. Thank you for including me.

Click here for images from the Fenton Gallery exhibition

Pamela’s ‘The Water and the Blood’ exhibition is in the stone-walled, barrel-vaulted space, entered through a narrow awning. The titles nearly put me off: Christ’s Passion, the Water and the Blood, The Sacred Heart! However her focus is on the role of the physical in spiritual transcendence; how the body can be vehicle for the Spirit. ‘Complex, dense, structural compositions, using glass and stone units linked by wire’. Impressive = sacred hearts and stations in abstract textures like flesh. Using the softer, more skin-like surface of paper, she depicts abuse – cutting, piercing, peeling, and the effect is startling. Like the flaying of Marsyas almost to find through the threaded flesh the emergence of the reality within. The Stations as ‘the way of the body’ are horrific: almost litmus tests of the skin at each blue, black, brown, red, clotted second of the various kinds of torture. Over these an etched ice pack of slender glass conveying the ever-present overarching gossamer of grace. Grace as expanding gyres. The third section, to the side in a tight little box, are the wound series. The five sense breakthrough to the world of matter. The holes pierced into the wall of our prison. These are wounds of purity, enlightenment, mercy and nourishment. The holes = stinging tautness. The call is to the wound which is the eye of each of us, with a moveable skin we call a lid. Eye-lid, stay open until the moulten drop is poured. The chain-mail slashed through to the centre of the mandala forces water from the wound, stitched as a cross through shattered structures, sending ripples of circling floodwater through the rim of the smashed eye-ball out to the four corners of the universe. This one was the icon of the whole.

Click here for images of Pamela Hardesty’s work from the Fenton Gallery exhibition

Click here to view the work

This body of work arose out of an interest in the physicality of spirit, the role of the body in spiritual progress and transformation. This interest came out of my own struggles to understand my faith in relation to the sacramental life of Catholicism, and also out of my own developing awareness of my humanity, my physical self and its relationship to the Divine through the practice of prayer and my life in Christ.

I looked to the Passion story as the pre-eminent depiction of a physical journey toward spiritual progress. I researched traditional, symbolic narratives of the Passion, as well as medieval Wound cults, particularly of the Sacred Heart, and votive understandings of Passion elements.

I worked very much with the atmosphere and proportions of the Fenton Vault space in mind. Its intimate, enclosed, and confrontational parallel vaulted stone rooms were chosen as particularly suitable for my imagery. I saw that each of these spaces could hold one of the two traditional aspects of the Sacred Heart impact: one side for the Water and all that it symbolised in cleansing, healing; and one side for the flow of Blood, with its nourishing impact of covenant.
I began by creating a “portrait” or a distillation of each aspect of the Sacred Heart flow in complex, dramatic, heavy abstractions of the Water and of the Blood in glass, stone, and paper units bound by wire. In these I used the central focus of a wound surrounded by a flow of glass as a circular, divine space surrounded by a square of materials used to depict Intellect and Matter as the receptors of the Divine flow.
The other strand of work looked at the physical breakdown as agent for transformation. Here I used paper for its skin-like, transformational qualities. I submitted it to various abusive processes such as cutting, piercing, peeling, and rubbing, and then stained through its delicacy with acrylic pigments. I used this paper under etched heavy glass layers holding water imagery of the Holy Spirit. Throughout this work I hoped to present the suffering and breakdown as a beautiful and necessary agent of growth and change. Two long paper sections held Stations of the Cross imagery; two square chalice-like works reference Passion and Resurrection; and a series of four Wound works show various aspects of the gifts associated with the flow from Christ’s wound, namely Purity, Mercy, Enlightenment, and Nourishment.

The two strands of work in this exhibition have continued to operate for me as languages of spiritual understanding. The complex glass structures work as a kind of “divine” vocabulary, working with light effects—while the paper continues to articulate human concerns and experience in its fragile, malleable surface.

Click here to view the work

In 1986 I moved from the U.S. to Ireland in the hope of finding a simpler way of life, hopefully in a society more attuned to spiritual exploration, more appreciative of the poetic and the immaterial. I have settled in Ireland to teach and work, developing my artistic vocabulary through a wide range of materials and processes, all united by a textiles sensibility and an effort to articulate through form my evolving Christian faith.

My first work in Ireland was realised through the medium of paper. In my fine arts training in California I learned papermaking. I learned to appreciate the versatility of paper, its neutral character lending itself to endless transformation. I developed methods to apply pigments and various abrasive and heat treatments to commercial papers to imitate organic surfaces. These papers I then divided into various units by tearing. I then reassembled these small units into relief surfaces, mimicking natural rhythms from the landscape. I liked the way that these broken surfaces manipulated light and shadow, creating a shifting and living surface. I spent a lot of time in the wildness of the west of Ireland, observing the processes of nature. I felt that these natural rhythms offered some clue to the nature of God and the universal reality. Through this language of organic, flowing, and faceted surfaces I worked to convey my spiritual yearning and questioning. The forms of my paper work often evoked vessels of movement such as boats or birds, or of sources of knowledge such as books.

In 1991 my work changed direction. I felt a need to move away from the vagueness and darkness of much of my paper work, and its dependence on the beauty of nature. I explored simpler, pure geometric forms in an effort to release my work from nature references. I explored new materials, which worked very directly with light through transparency and reflection. Glass became my main focus. In 1993 I exhibited a large body of work on the Paradiso of Dante, using mainly glass, but also plaster and metal to convey the highly structured but lyrical, affirmative language of the poem. I cut the glass into small squares or triangles and mounted these on patterns of nails to make relief mosaics, which could float over painted images underneath. I felt that glass was more appropriate now to my clearer realisation of faith.

Since the mid-90’s I have continued to explore glass in cut units in a great variety of structures. I developed ways to use wire to wrap and link glass units into fabric-like and flexible structures and three-dimensional vessels. I also incorporate stone units and text to enrich this language. I continue to create metaphors for my faith journey. I see the grid structures of my glass fabric as analogous to the method of reason. The flexibility of these grids means that I can manipulate them to evoke flow and motion. The actual process of constructing these complex works is meditative and prayerful, and seems to me appropriate in translating my inner insights into form. I have explored themes of baptism and salvation, and at present I am working on a series based on the wounds of Christ’s Passion, presenting them as agents of transformation.

In the year 2000 I became a Catholic, and my work has increasingly sought to serve my faith as a contemporary response. It is beginning to find a role in places of worship.

Click here to see images of the work

One of the reasons great works of art survive, or, rather, persist, is because they are quarries for other works of art. A great work brims with possibilities for the artists who come after it. Think of the thousands of poems and pictures inspired over the centuries by Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. My own most recent collection of poems ended up as a belated lament for my parents. But my emotions had found no embodiment until I re-read in the Odyssey Homer’s account of Odysseus’ re-union with his failing father Laertes and, in Hades, with his dead mother Anticleia. Words many hundreds of years old illuminated my sorrow.

I get the feeling from this lovely exhibition that Dante’s vision lit up Pamela’s mind at just the right time in her life. A sense of blessed coincidence radiates from these works. At a certain stage in her own spiritual search – her own inner adventure – she seems to have realised for herself what Dante is about. I sense shadows lifting and a working-through to a state of mind that is joyful and positive.

Dante’s astronomy was Ptolemaic. He believed that the universe was geocentric; that the earth was at the centre of the universe – with the planets and the stars revolving around it. But it’s one of the wonderful facts of modern astronomy that, for me, defines the lasting value of his poetic vision and its reflection in Pamela’s art. Dante is like one of those stars whose light set out on its long journey centuries – aeons – ago to brighten the sky above our heads this very night. Out of the several passages she has responded to, a key moment emerges so far as this exhibition is concerned – in Canto XXIX:

As in crystal or in amber or in glass
A shaft of light diffuses though the whole,
Its ray reflected instantaneously…

This fine show shakes out of our minds all the lovely words that describe how light behaves: flash, dazzle, shine, glitter, glimmer, gleam. And it gives them an appropriate setting: emerald, diamond, sapphire, ruby. Pamela tells me that her mother was a seamstress and her father a television repairman, obsessed with complicated circuitry. I sense that those skills contribute a gleam or two to this exhibition’s burst of light. With her rainbow shards Pamela has worked out a way of drawing light, of sewing together “the heavens’ embroidered cloths”. She has brought indoors one of those brilliant starry nights when there’s a halo round the moon.

Dante ends Purgatory with four lines which I shall use to salute the achievement of this exhibition and the light of Dante’s vision, a light which set out from Italy – as from a star – long before we were born:

From those holiest waters I returned
To her reborn, a tree renewed, in bloom
With newborn foliage, immaculate,
Eager to rise, now ready for the stars…

Pamela Hardesty’s work makes us “ready for the stars”. I am very happy to open this exhibition.

Click here to see images of the work

Pamela Hardesty:

Dante’s Paradiso, completed in 1321, is the third and final part of The Divine Comedy. The poem is a description of his journey through the many spheres of heaven towards the abode of God, and this journey serves as a long progress toward spiritual understanding.

My previous work in paper dealt with texture and landscape, and metaphor of a spiritual intent. In The Paradiso I found a challenging and masterful metaphor for spiritual realisation. I was attracted by the magnificent geometric structure which gave clarity to its beautiful imagery of affirmation and joy. I set about trying to give form to this imagery, hoping that the power of Dante’s vision would thereby reveal itself.

The all-pervading image of Dante’s journey through heaven is light in many forms, culminating in the source of pure light or truth, which is Dante’s vision of God. I found the main challenge of my work was to somehow convey these stages, degrees, of light. I began to explore means of creating actual reflective surfaces, using glass, especially, as well as creating illusions of light in layers of paint. I looked to medieval solutions for the depiction of light, particularly in the paintings and mosaics of Dante’s period. My study of the mosaics of Ravenna, where The Paradiso was written, was an important influence.

The works in this exhibition represent, firstly, portraits of specific heavens, such as the group of seven planetary heavens, which are highly structured and complex, illustrating the various spiritual lessons presented to Dante in each heaven according to its theme. The rest of the works represent specific visions from the higher levels, where his sight has achieved a more mystical ability.

The Paradiso has pushed me toward new materials and a broader landscape. I remain in awe of Dante’s achievement, its vitality across nearly seven centuries, and its potential to take me further.

Seamus Heaney:

The greatness of The Divine Comedy has to do with an overall sense of the artist having ‘come through’. Allegorical, theological, political, personal, encyclopaedic, all these it is, but its big shape is the archetypal one – of faring forth, going to a nadir, and returning to a world that is renewed by the boon won in that other place. To read it is to go through a refining element, to be steadied and reminded of the possible dimensions of our life. Obviously, Pamela Hardesty has felt its huge inspirational force, and been taught by the visionary excitement of it all.

Her installation is both a revelation of its own means and ends, and a reminder of the immense potential and staying power of Dante’s art.

Seamus Heaney,
January 1993
The Paradiso, Canto XXIX verses 136-145

“The primal light the whole irradiates,
and is received therein as many ways
as there are splendours wherewithal it mates.

Since then, affection waits upon the gaze
and its intensity, diversely bright
therein the sweets of love now glow, now blaze,

Consider well the breadth, behold the height
of His eternal goodness, seeing that o’er
so many mirrors it doth shed its light,

Yet One abideth as It was before.”

Click here to view the works from the Paradiso exhibition