Descent

Descent is a multi-panel painting of a spiral staircase inspired by the one found in the house museum of Gustave Moreau in Paris. Painted during a residency in a 19th-century church in London, the cast iron staircase in Descent unfurls to the ground alongside a tapestry of paintings. Wider at the bottom and tapered at the top, this 11-metre work responds to the soaring architecture in which it was both painted and eventually displayed, and references the biblical story of Jacob’s ladder, in which Jacob dreams of God coming down to him from heaven. The immediacy of the brushstrokes evokes movement, of a tumbling to earth, thereby subverting the typical reading of the story as a ladder to, rather than from, heaven. Installations of Descent have been presented at The Florence Trust in 2011 and Chichester Cathedral in 2015.