-If anyone tells you fire is light,pay no attention-

Carved wood,cotton,iron,

feathers,fishing hooks,animal fat,fire.

(7.5”x2”x8”)

This piece emerged during a time when I had started discovering the great spiritual traditions — not one in particular, but the ocean of them, their shared undercurrent. I was not looking for identity or answers. I was simply being drawn, as one is drawn by a current too wide and deep to resist.

There was a moment, or perhaps many moments, when I realized that the invitation of these traditions is not always to understand, or even to follow, but to enter. To surrender the self to something vast and real. Like the sea. This work carries that realization.

It is not about discernment. Not about measuring or judging. It is about dissolving. About what happens when you stop grasping for certainty, and allow yourself to be taken by what is — whether it comes in the form of beauty or difficulty. It is, in that sense, about love. Or the loss of self in love.

I remember reading a line, perhaps from Rumi, that said something like: “caught in the hook of His love”. That line stayed with me. This work feels like that. A kind of willing captivity. The kind where you're not trying to get free, but to go deeper in.

Visually, the piece contains gestures — echoes of sacred languages, textures that remind me of old places and memories not entirely mine, but ours. I didn’t set out to represent anything specific. It was more like listening. Like allowing the piece to emerge in the rhythm of what it needed to be.

The sea is present here, like in several pieces of this body of work with that particular quality it has to return over and over again. I spent part of my childhood in a Santa Rita, small fishing village in Cuba, with my grandparents. The sea was part of every day — not as backdrop, but as presence. It taught me early that something can be both immense and intimate. That great symbol, so pregnant of meaning is what I wanted to carry into this work, more like a gesture toward what cannot be named, but can be touched — if you let go.

— Timur