Deliver Us From Ourselves (2025)

Deliver Us From Ourselves takes the language of devotion and turns it inward, revealing faith as both a refuge and a contagion. The figure at its centre evokes a saint or prophet, yet her sanctity has rotted into multiplicity; a host of skulls and echoing mouths spill from her form, each crying, consuming, or dissolving into the next.

⤷ The painting was conceived as an exploration of internalised damnation, the idea that the monsters we beg to be saved from are often the ones we’ve created through belief, guilt, and repetition. Her gesture is prayerful but fractured, as if caught between worship and self-erasure. The golden halo behind her, a traditional emblem of divinity, flickers instead like a dying sun, illuminating decay rather than salvation.

The composition borrows the grandeur of ecclesiastical iconography but drains it of certainty. The sacred becomes grotesque, the prayer becomes a scream. The title references the final plea of the Lord’s Prayer, yet the answer seems to come from within rather than above — a warning that there may be no deliverance left but the one we deny ourselves.

Within The Damnation Project, this piece serves as a culmination: the spiritual autopsy of the series. It’s not about sin as transgression, but sin as inheritance — the way devotion and destruction become indistinguishable when sanctified by fear.