My Religious Studies background ensures that wherever I go, whatever I watch, read, or hear, I am looking for fragments of the sacred. I am chasing that elusive feeling of significance that arises from creative practice and religious ritual, that is woven through both religion and the arts.

My first book and PhD thesis, Spiritual Sensations, explores film’s power to generate mystical experiences. In Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void and Lars von Trier’s Melancholia I identify film techniques that focalise the viewer’s attention in a meditative or hypnotic manner, producing intense sensations that are then attributed sacredness despite the absence of a religious framework.

The fiction that I create is also compulsively drawn to religious themes.

My Velspar - Elegies series is a dark fantasy epic that explores the relationship between institutional religion and the immediate visionary pulse of the sacred.