Stories About Making Assumptions

Today's image was a bit of last minute experiment. I'd left it late in the day to get my image when I came across a postcard of Our Lady Of The Assumption from The Friars, our local Carmelite Priory at Aylesford. It's a gilded statue sculpted by Michael Clark, renowned for his religious artworks, that has dominated the centrepiece of the Priory's main 20th century gothic style shrine, designed by Adrian Gilbert Scott, since it was first erected in 1962 and has undergone an extensive recent renovation to restore its original lustre.
For some reason I didn't want to just capture a straight depiction (surely you should be able to create your own representation of the mother of Jesus for blip purposes!) so I decided to go down an abstract route and use the bubble wrap that I found protecting one of my brother's photography books. I also liked that you can just make about out the word "stories", that forms part of the title of the book - Hyperborea - Stories From The Arctic, on the right hand side of the image. The book is a career-to-date retrospective of the photographer and Academy Award nominee filmmaker Evgenia Arburgaeva and is an evocation of the colour, fragility and desolate beauty of the Siberian Arctic and of the lives borne out in such extremes and exclusion. 
I feel I've done her a huge disservice by just using the front of her book as part of my blip image so I've tagged a link to her website below so you can view some of her wonderfully ethereal and stunningly beautiful images for yourselves.

https://www.evgeniaarbugaeva.com