The film Interior castle (a blueprint) begins with the writings of the sixteenth-century Spanish mystic St Teresa of Avila, whose book  Interior Castle (1577) imagines the soul as a castle made of crystal. She offers this fictional cosmic building to her sisters: “In considering how strictly you are cloistered, my sisters, how few opportunities you have of recreation . . . I think it will be a great consolation for you . . . to take your delight in this Interior Castle, for you can enter it and walk about in it at any time without asking leave from your superiors.” Teresa’s writing represents the high-point of mystic writing, before it was relegated to the margins by the Enlightenment under the glare of rationality. It is a style where the personal, the erotic, the fictional, experiential knowledge, the autobiographical, and contemplative processes intertwine, creating texts radical in the way they allow opposites to not negate one another but to move in correspondence. This lends a somatic quality to texts that are a translation of bodily sensations and encounters brought into language in idiosyncratic ways that blur the boundaries between interior and exterior, action and contemplation, body and soul. In the centre of Teresa’s castle we encounter her God from out of whose “Divine breasts . . . flow stream of milk.”

The film acknowledges the impossibility of any “correct” rendering of Teresa’s castle, yet attempts to approach its intimate dwellings by drawing on a wide range of visual and cultural references (including a 12th-century Javanese poem The Bhomāntaka, which describes itself as a temple built from poetry). Interior castle (a blueprint) creates an image that can’t quite be held, a series of images in constant dialogue and negotiation with one another. 

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It is a tension which is explored in the related sculptures made for the neo-classical architecture of St. Bernard’s Well. Topped by a pineapple finial, and hosting a sculpture of the Greek goddess Hygeia with her snake, the sculptural works echo the well’s architectural language and form. Skirting the base of the walls of the circular pump-room, were installed a sequence of serpentine forms embossed with pineapple markings, bringing together two contradictory associations in the one image: the snake conjuring fear and suspicion, and the pineapple, a symbol for welcome. The window ledges support a series of sculptural forms in which moist clay, as it dries, develops its own independent form and language, pulling away from the structure which has sought to shape it. The clay thus both resists and relies on its support, a movement much like the way we experience language—as something that writes us and through which we must find our own ways of speaking. A series of small sculptures made from fruit skins—mangosteens, limes, and oranges—function in the same way. The softer skins of oranges and limes were moulded to the harder husk of the mangosteens, shifting as they dried and taking the form of the mangosteen skin at some points, pulling away at others.