This piece, Silent Saints, is one of those artworks that felt like it arrived before I understood it fully. What emerged on the page was not a narrative, but a condition. Not a character, but a state of being.
We are often surrounded by noise, action, urgency. But there’s another kind of experience—quieter, harder to grasp. It's the stillness that isn’t peace, the silence that isn’t calm, the suspension that isn’t rest. That’s the emotional terrain I wanted to explore.
Suspended in Stillness, Not in Serenity
The central forms in Silent Saints hang like inverted flowers or strange pods—somewhere between organic life and ritual object. They're delicate but deliberate. Each one is tied at the base with string, hanging from above as if caught mid-metamorphosis, or arrested just before becoming something else.
And though they hang still, nothing about them feels resolved. Their imaginary mouths are tied shut—restrained not violently, but firmly, and always with a purpose. The rope carries tiny crosses at the ends, suggesting something once meant to be sacred now functions more like a seal, or a lock. Not all forms of silence are voluntary. And not all reverence is freeing.
The Language of Inversion
Everything in this image is slightly off-axis. The floral shapes are upside down. Their orientation is reversed. They're not blooming, they're bound. This is a world in which growth isn't expressed through loud, visible transformation—but through contained endurance.
Even the raindrops fall with an unfamiliar weight. They’re not gentle. They don’t nourish. They’re heavy, black, and absolute. They mark the background like punctuation—a language of descent. The atmosphere is one of accumulation: of pressure, of history, of everything that has not been said.
No Gender, No Archetype—Just a Human State
Although some viewers might read these forms as feminine or religious, that was never my intention. This work is not about gender. It's not about archetypes. It's not even about saints, really.
It’s about being human in a moment when your voice doesn’t feel like it belongs to you. When the world keeps turning but you’re caught in a quiet place beneath it. It’s about how silence can be both survival and suffocation. And how stillness—real stillness—is not always restful. Sometimes it’s the most intense thing a person can endure.
A Kind of Internal Gravity
What I find most honest about this piece is its lack of resolution. The hanging forms don’t fight back. The black rain doesn’t stop. The silence doesn’t break open into sound. It simply continues. And in that continuation, there's a kind of gravity—a pull inward.
That’s what I wanted to communicate. Not a lesson. Not a moral. But a condition. A feeling you don’t name out loud, because naming it might fracture it. So you carry it instead. Quietly. Dignified. Still.
Why I Call Them “Silent Saints”
I called them Silent Saints not because they are holy, but because they are committed. They are keepers of inner truth. They bear the weight of their silence. They absorb, hold, and witness—without release. To me, that is what the piece expresses: the strength and sorrow of restraint, the way we carry what we cannot voice, and the quiet dignity of surviving it anyway.
