The Book of Revelation

Is It Really a Story About the End of the World?

For as long as I can remember, biblical stories have fascinated me.

Not simply because of what they say, but because of what might exist beneath the words.

What did those words mean when they were written?

What do they mean now?

And what happens when we stop being frightened by them long enough to really look?

Perhaps that fascination began at school. I attended a convent in Brecon, where I studied Religious Studies and the Bible for five years. Even then, I found myself questioning what I was reading.

I was particularly fascinated by the contradiction between belief and behaviour.

How could people read these extraordinary teachings about how we should treat one another, then walk back into the world and behave in ways that seemed completely opposed to them?

Why are human beings capable of such goodness — and such terrible destruction?

Those questions never really left me.

Eventually, they led me to one of the strangest, darkest and most visually extraordinary books in the Bible.

The Book of Revelation.

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The Book That Frightens People

Revelation has a reputation.

Even my great-aunt was a little concerned when I told her I intended to illustrate it.

And I understood why.

The Four Horsemen.

War.

Famine.

Death.

Plague.

The Beast.

The Whore of Babylon.

Armageddon.

Judgement.

The end of the world.

It isn't exactly light bedtime reading.

But I wanted to approach Revelation without deciding beforehand what it meant.

Was this really just an apocalyptic doomsday story?

Or had centuries of interpretation taught us to fear something far more complicated?

So I went back to the words.

And almost immediately, something struck me.

For a book with such a terrifying reputation, it begins by offering a blessing to those who read it, hear its words and take its message to heart.

That didn't feel insignificant.

What if I had entered this story expecting the wrong thing?

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Reading an Ancient Visual Language

I began to think of Revelation almost like reading hieroglyphics.

Its language is ancient.

Its symbolism belonged to another world.

Numbers, creatures, colours, objects and events carried meanings for people living nearly two thousand years ago that we cannot simply assume translate perfectly into our own time.

And then there are the words themselves.

They have travelled through centuries.

Languages.

Translations.

Cultures.

Religious traditions.

Human interpretation.

I couldn't pretend that I was somehow going to uncover the one definitive meaning hidden inside them.

I could only show you what I saw.

And that became incredibly exciting.

Because words and paintings share something I love.

Give the same words to a hundred people and they may imagine a hundred different things.

Stand a hundred people in front of the same painting and they may find a hundred different stories.

We bring ourselves with us.

Our experiences.

Our fears.

Our beliefs.

Our doubts.

Our histories.

So I began reading John's extraordinary vision and asking myself one question:

What do I see?

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This Could Never Be Just a Painting

Very quickly, I realised that a conventional painting wasn't going to be enough.

Revelation moves through worlds.

It shifts between Heaven and Earth, beauty and horror, destruction and salvation.

It is crowded with creatures, symbols, angels, cities, monsters and extraordinary visions.

I wanted the viewer to journey through it.

To move around it.

To open it.

To discover things.

To encounter darkness and beauty within the same work.

So I began creating something between painting and sculpture — a large narrative artwork in which John's story could physically unfold.

Paint.

Wood.

Metal.

Stained glass.

Precious stones.

Different materials gradually became part of the language of the piece.

I wanted you to feel the words through imagery.

To encounter the pain.

To experience the destruction.

But always with the knowledge that somewhere beyond it there was light.

The work would eventually take me around eighteen months.

And it became one of the hardest things I had ever attempted.

At times, I think Revelation sent me slightly mad.

I didn't know then quite how deeply this artwork was going to affect me.

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Destruction — Or Transformation?

As the work developed, another question began to trouble me.

What if the destruction isn't simply about the destruction of the world?

I hadn't begun this artwork believing that Revelation was a metaphor for dying.

That interpretation wasn't in my head when I started.

I wasn't trying to prove a theory through the painting.

It emerged while I was making it.

The deeper I travelled into John's vision, the more the destruction began to feel like something happening to the self.

Revelation repeatedly destroys portions of things — a third of this, a third of that — and I began wondering what would happen if I stopped reading those images only as physical catastrophe.

What if I was watching something being stripped away?

What if the things being destroyed represented our attachment to the corporeal world — to the body, the self and everything we believe makes us who we are?

And what if the darker imagery represented the parts of our human nature that also have to be confronted?

Our greed.

Our cruelty.

Our selfishness.

Our capacity to harm one another.

The beast within us.

Gradually, the end of the world began to look very different to me.

Perhaps I wasn't looking at the end of the world at all.

Perhaps I was looking at the end of the self.

I am not saying that this is what John meant.

I don't know.

This is my interpretation, and it developed through the process of making the artwork rather than being imposed upon it from the beginning.

But once Revelation began speaking to me in that way, the entire journey changed.

It also brought the book unexpectedly close to another story that fascinates me: Dante's Inferno.

Both can be read as journeys through darkness.

Both force us to confront human behaviour.

And both made me question what might exist on the other side.

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Are We the Apocalypse?

There is another reason Revelation continues to feel disturbingly relevant to me.

Mankind is an extraordinarily destructive force.

We wage wars.

We destroy landscapes.

We exploit one another.

We consume.

We divide ourselves.

We create technologies capable of extraordinary good and extraordinary destruction.

Perhaps we don't need supernatural forces to bring about an apocalypse.

We're perfectly capable of creating one ourselves.

That doesn't mean I believe Revelation predicts a particular modern event, or that I've somehow decoded its prophecy.

I haven't.

What interests me is something much more human.

Why does a book written so long ago still allow us to recognise ourselves within it?

Perhaps because, however much the world around us changes, some parts of being human don't change quite as quickly.

The desire for power.

The capacity for cruelty.

The instinct to follow.

The temptation to deceive.

The ability to destroy.

But also our capacity for compassion, courage, sacrifice, love and extraordinary goodness.

Those contradictions are still with us.

And perhaps that is one reason John's ancient monsters can continue to feel strangely familiar.

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From Darkness Into Light

For all its terrifying imagery, I didn't come away from Revelation thinking only about destruction.

Quite the opposite.

The further I travelled through it, the more important what came after the destruction became.

Light.

Release.

Renewal.

The New Jerusalem.

A beginning emerging from an ending.

That changed the artwork itself.

The darkness couldn't be its final destination.

Neither could death.

The work had to move towards something else.

And eventually, even the materials I used began to make that transition visible.

But that journey belongs inside the artwork and the journals that accompany it.

This Collection page is where the question begins.

What if Revelation isn't simply a story about the end?

Perhaps it is about what has to be relinquished before something else can begin.

Maybe that journey is religious.

Maybe it is spiritual.

Maybe it is psychological.

Maybe it is simply human.

I don't expect everyone looking at my artwork to see what I saw.

In fact, I hope they don't.

Because Revelation left me believing more strongly than ever that imagery — whether written or painted — changes according to the person standing before it.

We bring ourselves to the story.

Just as I brought myself to John's.

This artwork is therefore not my attempt to tell you what The Book of Revelation means.

It is something much more personal.

It is what happened when I entered John's vision without knowing where it would take me — and allowed the artwork to answer back.