My work recontextualizes sacred forms and materials within a modern urban setting to explore the disparity between the certainties of ideology and the fractured nature of contemporary living. By simultaneously adopting and distorting these familiar forms, I express both our desire for and disconnect from the promises of faith. Trained as a mosaicist in the Byzantine tradition, my materials are central to the work: the permanence of stone and metal; the magnificence of gold; the fragility of hand-cut paper. Every inch of the work is cut and placed by hand - the slowness of the process essential to its message, each step an act of devotion that moves towards the creation of a unified whole. Often there is a palpable absence in the work: an icon defined by the removal of its central figure, a house by the space between its bricks. The familiarity of the base form -a symbol, a pattern - allows us to recognize these omissions not as emptiness, but as a sort of delineated absence, evoking a sense of longing. In other work, distortions arise through the imprecision of the human hand or the interaction of an object with its surroundings, sacred geometries splitting apart as slight imperfections magnify across the surface of the work. Complete in their incompletion, these altered symbols open themselves up to new interpretation - an ambiguity that carries with it both the freedom of self-determination and the tension of the undefined.