Auguries Through The Mist

Auguries Through the Mist, 2024

3mx 3m x3m, Ceramics, steel, water, pump, wood

MARY MARY, at theColab, The Artist's Garden,

the roof terrace above Temple Tube Station until Spring 2026

Auguries Through the Mist subverts the stability of classical fountain geometry exploring water as a locus for metamorphosis and mysticism. Named after the augurs, which were Graeco-Roman priests who interpreted divine will through the behaviour of birds, the work bridges air and water to reflect on this relationship between the terrestrial, human survival and belief. At the top stands a temple folly crowned with a wing-like form. Water cascades over a ball encrusted with ceramic fossil-esque creatures and sloshes into an internal grotto. The globe is imagined as simultaneously the universe, a single drop of water magnified, a womb, a Sisyphean ball and a grotto, embedded with the monstrous splayed forms of our amphibious past. The work draws from the satirical print Monster Soup, which visualises the polluted Thames as a monstrous, chaotic hellish realm from Milton’s Paradise Lost. This evocation of the monstrous extends to historic associations between women, the garden, the womb and disorder. Here, the fountain resists the triumphant spurt often seen in classical forms, instead recalling the biblical description of the Virgin Mary as a fountain sealed. Yet water does flow, a symbolic unsealing, opening up space for female potential beyond motherhood and grieving.