S understands that she is herself somehow subject to certain levels of control or influence exercised by three ordinary ornaments or objets d’art lined up at perfect intervals on a shelf or mantlepiece at the centre of the room, a mantlepiece much higher than the usual, so as to exist beyond the height of its function. These three effigies are sculpted from different stones or moulded from clay and are to S, the vital components in her structuring of the room’s elements and by extension, her own. These three tiny sculptures are not household gods to be worshipped daily and neither are they fetishes to be harkened to, ritualised, given offerings of salt or rice.

Certainly they began as thoughts turned into forms.

The first, the least powerful also holds sway, for S, at certain moments in the room’s intrinsic balance of power and for S it goes without saying that the absence of its touchstone position in the equilibrium, the absence of its levelling presence, and the whole invisible equilibrium of the room would cause it to implode, fall in on itself like a sack of feathers. It is the carving of a small child, a girl, leaning against a lamppost, her eyes portraying nothing, her cheek against the metal. This object provides the mid-tone, the median and stands at the far left of the mantlepiece or high shelf.

Off to the far right of this is a carving of unknown origin that might easily have been unearthed at one of the more down at heel curio shops of Piraeus. It could also have been dug up by archeologists of a previous century from any number of ancient sites around the world, from Palmyra to Tenochtitlan. It portrays two creatures, equally cat and dog, engaged in a tug of war with the severed head of a queen, her crown intact. There is that about this savage object that implies a hope forlorn, something sickening, a useless sacrifice. It carries a weird gravity and the innate implication that no amount of blood spilled will appease the cruel god or gods that lie within it. This image controls the lowest register of the room, the heated ardour, the magnetic pull at the bottom of everything and it is to this object, tiny enough to fit into a child’s hand, that S brought the tributes she imputed it called for when the balance shifted down towards the blackness, the darkest of hearts. The chaos, the ballast of blood that had to be released upon occasion, were summoned by this image.

The final sculpture, the epicentre of the room, the ultimate catalyst for the various fields, the patternation humming with secret energy, discontinuous and non-symmetrical (although always balanced even in their misalignment). This is the central point which, at times, manifests in the person of S herself.The image is a series of shapes, geometric shapes, no more, an underlying obsidian black coloured in places by the speckled mosaic of shell and turquoise, the object seems to weave in and out of itself, curves and abstract folds, presenting shapes that are no shape at all, impossible that it could ever have been made from the material that it was formed from. For S, it hums with atavistic female energy, the magnetic pull of warring forces.

How do these objects relate or interact? Is their relationship that of puppet, manipulator and voice and if that is the case, what sort of factor is S in this shared equation or symbiosis? As each separate feature can be identified, could it even by defined as a system? How is its influence manifested? Is S a component, its audience or its amanuensis?

She lies in bed, motionless and considers nothing of this, observing the patterns only; senses awaiting the tiniest vibration.