This series came about quite by surprise when I was invited by friends to use their barn as a temporary studio. While I thought I might pursue a familiar subject, it was, to me, the strange, unfamiliar interior of the barn that captured my attention and became the focus of this series of drawings. In the process of creating these drawings, I was reminded of Piranesi’s Carceri d'invenzione or Imaginary Prisons, c. 1745 to 1750 — which became the source of inspiration for these introspective interiors. Like Piranesi’s Prisons that depict enormous subterranean vaults with stairs, in my series, ladders are often seen as a path through the composition that lead the viewer on a visual journey up, down, and into — whereby the barn is a metaphor for the belly of the whale, a kind of surrogate for mother or womb — or, by extension, a metaphor for the journey of the soul.