St Agatha

2022 / Cast glass and steel

This work is an exploration of the character of Saint Agatha, using cast glass and steel. A particularly long and slow process to give life once more to the Christian saint, whose breasts were cut off when she refused to give herself to a man, and which then - the story says - healed overnight.

Up to this day, she is the saint prayed to by Christian believers who experience mastectomies or sexual abuses. This glass sculpture is, for the artist, a way to re-appropriate the narrative of St Agatha as a victim into one which gives her agency. Saint Agatha is often depicted iconographically carrying her excised breasts on a platter. In the artist’s work the breasts stand in the room, made of solid and heavy matter and gazing upon the viewer.

The artist uses glass for its inherent particularities - a liquid and a solid, fragile and strong, sharp and soft material, made of small pieces of sand and melted at temperatures that vary between 538-927°C.

The sculpture was created as part of a larger series of work, named Land of my dreams between 2019-2022, bringing together sculptural objects, installation, photography, vegetal organisms and moving-image. It was exhibited during the 2022 Royal College of Arts degree show in London.