Shrines

I did some growing up in Hong Kong, when there was still a bit of bush to roam around in on the Island, I’d often come across shrines and bone burial jars. My best mate Mike - a local - possessed a shrine in the amah’s area behind the kitchen of his apartment in Villa Monte Rosa so they were well set in my imagination as a child.

Shrines are instinctively important to me because they indicate a threshold between ordinary life and meaningful presence. Across cultures and time, we have repeatedly created small concentrated places where memory, reverence, fear, grief, gratitude, ancestry, or transcendence can become tangibly considered.

Anthropologically, shrines do many things at once. They turn space into place. They externalise inner experience.They mediate between worlds. They create continuity through time. They materialise the invisible social order. They help regulate consciousness, and, if that’s not reason enough, they express a universal human intuition that there is something more to all this.

A shrine says: something happened here, someone matters here, or a presence is near here. Without this type of marker, the space would seem too abstract, therefore, one can say that shrines differentiate the world emotionally and spiritually, punctuating our lives with significance.

Much of human feeling is difficult to hold internally and, if modern methods of, say, grief counseling are contextualised, shrines can give these emotions form. Therefore, shrines can help people negotiate the uncertainty of liminal zones - places where emotional balance loosens whilst pain is negotiated.

In a sense, they act as anti-forgetting devices, shrines do; preserving relationships in a given cultural context beyond physical absence, and, the value of ritualised attention can change the perception of loss (even secular people often feel this in memorial spaces, cathedrals, cemeteries, or natural sanctuaries).

At a deep level, shrines suggest to me that reality contains more meaning than is immediately visible and my treatment of the original images taken in this series indicates the depth and richness of symoblism I see in them.