Research & Writing

My research explores the relationship between art, spirituality, consciousness and transformation in secular contemporary life. At the centre of my work is the idea of art as spiritual technology: the possibility that artistic practices and aesthetic experiences can help regulate attention, affect and meaning, creating forms of transformation that no longer depend on traditional religious belief.

My work explores how art can generate spiritually significant aesthetic experiences: moments of awe, wonder, altered perception, symbolic intensity, self-transcendence and connection beyond the ordinary ego-bound self.

I am interested in art not only as object or representation, but as practice, experience and ritual. Art may function as a spiritual practice for artists, viewers and participants, and may create temporary communities of attention, emotion and meaning. In this sense, the artist can sometimes perform roles historically associated with priests, shamans and bards: giving form to invisible realities, collective affects and transformative states.

My approach is phenomenological, affective and non-reductive. It draws on Tomkins's theory of affect, McGilchrist's account of right-hemisphere attention, Schore's work on affect regulation and interpersonal neurobiology, Dissanayake's artification hypothesis, James's radical empiricism and phenomenology as methods for taking lived experience seriously without requiring prior religious belief.

This section gathers the theoretical, dialogical and public-facing dimensions of my research. The Writings page presents the published and developing papers that form the academic arc of the work. The Concepts page introduces the core ideas that form the spine of my book in progress, Spirituality for the Uninitiated. The Conferences & Networks page traces how these ideas have been presented to specialist audiences in spirituality, consciousness, arts-based research and post-religious culture. The Dialogues & Convening page documents conversation, Q&A and public discussion as forms of research practice.

The section is designed as a map rather than a linear argument. Readers may enter through academic writing, conceptual definitions, conference presentations or conversations, depending on whether they are looking for scholarship, orientation, public talks or dialogue. Together, these pages explore how art, spirituality, consciousness and transformation can be studied in secular life without reducing them either to doctrine or to vague wellbeing.