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 and I’d admire it as I watched his cook, Ah Fong.

Shrines seem instinctively important. They indicate a threshold between our ordinary life and other meaningful presences, across cultures and time, they’re concentrated places where memory, reverence, fear, grief, gratitude, ancestry, or transcendence can become quitely 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, 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. Shrines differentiate the world emotionally and spiritually, punctuating our lives with significance Without this type of marker, space would seem… too abstract.

Shrines can help people negotiate the uncertainty of liminal zones - places where emotional balance loosens whilst pain is negotiated. Therefore, 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 ritual-based 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 images in this series indicates the depth and richness of symbolism I see in them.