G l o s s a r y   o f   t e r m s

A glossary of terms and phrases that appear across the site. Not definitions, but coordinates — a way into the work,  a way to pause inside it.

Intersentient  States

Forms that hover between presence and program, between the organic and the made. They are not resolved. Not symbolic. They hold a stillness before cognition — as if waiting to be recognised, or named, or forgotten. These states do not communicate directly but invite a sensing beyond language, a reciprocity felt through material rather than declared by it. Intersentient figures may appear human, yet their gaze, posture, or configuration suspends easy categorisation. They are intermediaries of experience — embodied forms that emerge from touch, memory, and algorithmic residue, mediating a field where perception itself becomes shared.

Reliquary Forms

Not containers of faith, but vessels of potential. These works do not memorialise, but suspend — material fragments held in tension, as if memory and future had condensed into object. They echo devotional artefacts without belonging to any creed. They are places of pause, of inward projection. What they hold is uncertain: not a relic, but an atmosphere, a held ambiguity.

Vessels, Figures, Panels

Three languages. The vessel: constraint and volume. The figure: presence and echo. The panel: inscription and surface. Each informs the others. Each returns to stillness differently. Together they form a triadic practice — each mode of making shaping and reflecting the others. The vessel may carry the residue of a figure. The panel may become a flattened reliquary. These categories blur, intentionally.

Distilled Attention

A phrase from the studio. A form of making in which gesture is reduced to necessity — not minimalism, but a concentration of energy into the essential. Something quieter than expression. This is attention honed through time: each mark, texture, or incision arrives after hesitation, reconsideration, return. It is a form of intimacy with the material — not dominance, but attunement.

Suspended Geometries

Forms that hold balance without closure, poised between order and dissolution. They register rhythm and proportion while refusing resolution. Their force lies in the tension of what is withheld, not delivered.

Resonant Groupings

These are not literal conversations, but modes of attunement. What emerges is an intersentient field—a quiet state of mutual bearing or resonance, in which each form both holds and alters the presence of the others. The artist likens these moments to musical harmonics, quantum entanglement, or the charged hush of Giacometti’s studio. Such arrangements might be described as choral juxtapositions—where individual voices merge into a relational whole—or, in certain paired cases, as chiral juxtapositions: echoing forms that mirror one another asymmetrically, like non-superimposable siblings. These subtle relational geometries are part of the work’s meaning, not merely its display.

Chiral Juxtaposition

A poetic-scientific term adapted from molecular chemistry, where chirality describes objects that are mirror images of one another but cannot be superimposed—like left and right hands. Transposed into the visual language of vessels and sculpted heads, a chiral juxtaposition refers to the pairing of two forms that are kin, yet misaligned: similar in material or gesture, but resisting symmetry. In David Barrow’s practice, these pairings often emerge intuitively. One vessel may seem to lean toward another, echoing its volume or pitch, yet diverging in rhythm or tilt. Heads might share a gaze or contour, but refuse alignment. What arises is a quiet tension—a dialogue of divergence—that speaks to difference held within relation. Such juxtapositions suggest a form of intersentient divergence: not contradiction, but distinction-in-proximity. The effect is neither decorative nor didactic, but attuned—like a note struck slightly off harmonic, producing a resonance more complex than unison. Chiral juxtaposition invites the viewer to inhabit this space of near-touch, where likeness and estrangement remain in balance.

Reflector Figure

The Reflector Figure extends the exploration of mirroring begun in the Vestibule Figures. Here, the surface becomes an active interface — neither mask nor skin, but a membrane through which perception itself is refracted. The mirror-like head-plate acts as a locus of self-encounter, a zone where the figure perceives its own quasi-chiral echo: familiar yet deviated, coherent yet displaced.

This reflective zone transforms the act of viewing into a reciprocal event. The observer’s gaze is not simply received but bent back upon itself, as if the sculpture were contemplating the one who contemplates it. Such figures seem to inhabit an emergent awareness — an intersentient interval between self and other — where identity flickers, multiplies, or dissolves into reflective space.

In this sense, the Reflector Figure may be read as a study in material consciousness: clay or metal behaving as thought, matter turned toward its own image. Its presence invites a momentary alignment between object and witness, a shared resonance of seeing and being seen