Firing the Idols examines how images acquire sacred authority and how the body becomes a site in which historical violence is remembered and transformed.
The exhibition takes its title from colonial representations of the “Burning of the Idols,” in which Spanish friars destroyed Maya sacred objects as an instrument of conversion. Replacing “burning” with “firing” shifts the meaning of fire from erasure to material transformation. Within ceramic practice, firing does not eliminate an object: it produces its final form.
Through this displacement, the project reconsiders the idol not as a false object of worship, but as an image onto which desire, fear, memory, and hope are projected. The works ask how such images survive across time and continue to shape both collective histories and intimate psychological experience.
Presented inside Holy Trinity Church in Islington, the exhibition brought encaustic paintings and ceramic sculptures into dialogue with Christian architecture. Rather than opposing the sacred and the pagan, the installation occupied the unstable territory between them.
