Suspended along the route of their perilous journeys, two figures touch at a point in time and space and are seemingly bolted to the ground by the forces of nature. They endure their frenzied environment with unbound energy, yet their vigorous battle seems futile and their ultimate demise inevitable. Echoes here of Masaccio’s fresco Expulsion from the Garden of Eden, and in another sense, John Keats’s poem Ode to a Grecian Urn, depicting men and maidens frozen perpetually in song and dance, but forever held on the verge of actual fulfilment. In my own House of the Fetish, the figures are locked in physical union, encarcerated within the act of consummation, though of course they suffer no less in their apparent torment. I am also reminded of Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, with its courageous spirit and heroic motifs, albeit Delacroix’s symbolism is less about the primacy of the physical and more about moral duty, national pride and the cost of freedom.