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Gulam Mohammed Sheikh, my professor in Baroda, India, suggested that, in order to overcome the transitional difficulties of resettling in England, I needed to lay hold of an essential narrative, and one which was personally significant to me, but of which I had hitherto fought shy. This was unexpected and unnerving advice. However, in the first weeks after returning to the UK I received an invitation to make a set of images to complement Sr. Frances Makower’s text The Path to Calvary. This book project was published by the Rocket Press in 1994 and became for me the genesis of a large body of biblical imagery that toured over the following four years.

The Apocrypha, Old and New Testaments are teeming with narratives and mythic imagery, yet it is not the stories I am drawn to, rather the dilemmas that their characters face. In the parable teachings, in particular, we are led to places of self-realisation and change: I am concerned with those instances of epiphany when transformation becomes possible.

An important element of using biblical imagery is its art historical heritage, all the previous generations of artists who have worked with the same texts. Telling and retelling these subjects, from differing political and theological contexts, has created a tremendously rich resource of interpretation and whatever one does is inescapably influenced by this legacy. My biblical imagery is staged in the present, as I believe that the truths of the bible are timeless but only remain alive if relevant today. I consider that imagination is the key to grasping the complexities of history, poetry, morality and regeneration that the bible contains.