A collage of thoughts inspired by our photos of Anish Kapoor’s ‘Sectional Body preparing for Monadic Singularity’ at Liverpool Cathedral, August 2024.

This post is a collaboration with DC who took the photos and explored ideas with me.

A huge black and red box, light and shadows created by the sun pouring through the cathedral’s stained glass. There is something organic about it. There are apertures and openings, curves and vessels. Some of the holes go all the way through the object. The light comes through the top circle of the church window, the colours of the stained glass blown out by the burst of natural light streaming in, landing perfectly on the orifice of the structure.

There is a vagina, somehow pinned open in a way that seems obscene, exposing the opening. It is shiny, glossy and perfect. And light is pouring through the opening. Divine light, love and grace is pouring down from the glorious zone above the vagina, the zone of pleasure, pouring down, dripping onto our humanity. This is real light, the sun’s light coming from 94 million miles away, through our magnetosphere, through the stained glass of the cathedral, to land on the stretched plastic of this curve here.

This structure celebrates and glorifies the site of the birth of all things, the essential and divine function. This is not out of place in a church. This is the site of our pleasure and our birth. The thing that is born is the thing that has the capacity to love and be loved.

Kapoor has spoken of the void as a space filled with potential, not emptiness

Inside the box, it feels as though there are stylised versions of bodily organs flowing around me. There is symmetry within the body of the box; the seams and ribs of the vessels curve. Light is moving and spreading through the vessels. From the outside it seems to be a singular perspective, and then when I’m inside I become aware that there is more going on.

There are juxtapositions and contrasts between the rigidity of the box and the voluptuous slitheriness of the contents of the box. Another contrast with the cathedral setting – the hard, bunter red of the stone and the glittering multiplicity of the stained glass windows. One photograph has people in it, and this creates another contrast. There is a gateway to reality. There is an abstract box and there are lives going on here.

The black box is holding secrets, a record of what has happened. It could become sentient – this is the singularity. If we think the singularity is something in the future and something to be fearful of, this work might suggest to us that it’s something that has already happened, and that’s why we’re here. We’re fearful of something that we’re already part of. The thing we’re looking for outside ourselves, perhaps a spiritual connection, is already within us.