A project that explores holy water.

A project that explores holy water in Valdichiana in Tuscany. This work was exhibited as part of the Cortona on the move festival 2025. 

Water became the thread.

Seen and unseen, remembered and revered, water has long shaped this region – carving valleys, filling baths, flowing beneath churches, and leaving its trace in story and stone.

I was drawn to the tension-and tenderness-between the ancient and the adolescent. Drawing on local legends and working with young people from the area, the series conjures playful tableaus that blur the past and present.

I began to ask: how do phones and vapes sit alongside 17th-century ruins? Do the young people of today still sense the stories beneath their feet? Repeatedly, it was the churches that stilled me. I stood absorbed by the paintings in each one. These quiet caves have absorbed grief, hope, prayer. They’ve healed. At the algae thick thermal baths, I felt something similar. A meditative stillness. A pause in time.

I’m not a religious person. But I am deeply affected by spaces that encourage reflection, stillness, reverence.  Water that flows through these places may not be holy. But it does connect. It does heal.

And perhaps – it does change lives.