In virtual reality, The Bell Jar interrogates the soma and psychology of Other and Self. The monumental installation is experienced within Archai Virtualis, a virtual museum built by its curators to Vitruvian principles which promote (inter alia) the perfect proportions of Renaissance Man. Inside this frame, the artist scripts The Bell Jar as a room: sculpting domed proportions, arched apertures, and oculus that choreographs the arc of the sun and moon. In VR, this room suggests a womb – fluid, enclosing, and warm – while its classical ethos conjures the authority of Greco-Roman systems and architectural lore.

Across the virtual membrane of VR, The Bell Jar proposes a translucent portal between the seen and unseen, hovering at the thresholds of psychic encounters, surreal apparitions, epiphanies, and dystopian dreams. At the centre, its crystal-glass figures rise from a circular concrete pedestal, arching inward in parallel and perfect harmony. Autonomous and precarious, they lean in but do not break. Frozen in a balletic pas de deux, the figures crystallise tensions between yearning bodies, as if the surrounding Covid pandemic logic of physical distancing has infiltrated the virtual sphere. A sense of entanglement is deepened by the title, drawn from Sylvia Plath’s iconoclastic novel The Bell Jar (1963), which probes a free-thinking woman’s struggle with alienation and insanity. In this vein and beyond, the work holds invisible structural constraints up to the light, while opening euphoric avenues for escape.