In the seven years I have spent in the space of the sonnets, the sequence has been emerging as this living presence — as an urgent message to humanity, which, for some reason, just wanted to be translated into the language of colour at this time.

Richard Rudd writes:

The poet T.S. Elliot said that as far as literature is concerned, “The world is divided between Shakespeare and Dante — there is no third.” <…> in his supreme work The Divine Comedy, Dante left us what is arguably the greatest map of human consciousness ever written. Whereas Shakespeare used drama, Dante used allegory as a means to communicate an immortal truth about human nature. The Divine Comedy essentially describes the geography of consciousness as it moves from the lower frequencies to the very highest.

In Shakespeare’s sonnets, this breathtaking range of consciousness is found not in Dante’s grand metaphysical realms, but in the mess and glory of human love stories, in our longing and our joy, in our sacrifices and our betrayals — in the realm of earthly human experience. Our inner hell and our inner heaven, playing with one another within the space of a single sonnet (or even a single line).

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