Python & Typhon

Python and Typhon emerged from the dissolution of a Western esoteric and alchemical lineage of which I had been part. I found myself grieving not only the loss of the group, but the ending of a shared practice and lineage.

The works grew from river walks along the Thames with a former mentor and dear friend. We gathered mother-of-pearl fragments, remnants of the Victorian button-making industry, including two forms that resembled Python and Typhon, serpents we had worked with in the unseen through our practice.

In one configuration, they form a lemniscate upon a Black Mirror, each serpent’s mouth meeting the other’s tail: a double ouroboros with no fixed beginning or end.

The serpents, lemniscate, Black Mirror and ultramarine blue carry the material language of the practice itself.

I think of these works as living relics or artefacts of a lineage lost, and as grief touchstones.

They are not an attempt to reconstruct what has been lost. They are evidence that something can end, dissolve and change form without entirely disappearing.