About 25 years ago, I read a single page of “Oscar and Lucinda” by Peter Carey for an A-level English Literature ‘unseen’ exam.

A life-size glass church, made by missionaries in the Australian outback, has somehow become unhinged from its foundations and is floating down a river. Trapped inside the glass cathedral is a dragonfly, colliding against the walls trying to escape, blind to the concept of glass. When I read that page more than half a lifetime ago, I recognised a parallel collision between the seriousness with which we take our life’s endeavors, and the limitations of our understanding. It stayed with me.

When I started creating worlds inside glass boxes about ten years ago – boxes you could stand both inside and outside, that embodied both vulnerability and strength, in a space that was simultaneously intimate and infinite – Peter Carey’s paragraph, from so many moons before, came to mind. And so the Glass Cathedrals name and concept was born.