Consider this Altar: There is no room which can contain God

How shall I call upon my God, my God, my Lord? Surely, when I call on him, I am calling on him to come into me. But what place is there in me where my God can enter me? Lord, my God, is there any room in me which can contain you? - St. Augustin, Confessions

My work investigates the design of sacred space and its influence on the act of worship. I am drawn to how architecture, furnishings, and light shape physical posture and, in turn, spiritual awareness. Within this inquiry, the altar and the icon hold special significance—both as objects of devotion and as symbols that carry visual and emotional weight.

This body of work explores the evolution of the altar’s design language, understood as a meeting place between the divine and the human. In its earliest form, people stacked stones where they encountered God; over time, altars grew more elaborate, fashioned from precious materials. These structures chart a visual history of our changing aesthetic values and theological ideas. Today, the boundaries between sacred and ordinary spaces continue to blur—churches gather in basements and school auditoriums, while old cathedrals become hotels or condominiums. I am fascinated by this fluidity, by how spaces once charged with reverence are continually reinterpreted.

Consider This Altar reimagines the traditional architecture of worship through transient materials such as sound and light. The work comprises a series of reflective paintings stacked on the wall like totems—flat, luminous forms that serve as portals and gestures toward an embodied experience of the divine. The surfaces refract light and shift with the viewer’s movement, creating a sense of presence that recalls the radiance of gold leaf in Orthodox icons. The use of ovals and circles references ancient symbolic geometries: the circle representing divine wisdom, the square human understanding. Through these forms, I invite viewers to reconsider their orientation toward what is sacred. These are not altars as we have seen them before, yet they remain rooted in the continuum of their history.