What the fire begins, the vessel must hold.

This series lingers at the threshold of transmutation—where the process turns inward, condensing the vastness of becoming into the intimacy of the face. These are not masks in the traditional sense, but fluid enclosures of transformation. Sculptural forms, like rippling glass or liquid gold, flow across the skin as if capturing the precise moment the spirit begins to shift shape. The faces are veiled, not to conceal, but to protect something fragile in emergence—identity still molten, still forming. Each curvature, each drip, each distortion becomes a language of becoming. Here, the esoteric turns personal. The ancient pursuit of gold is not external. It is the alchemical softening of self, the sacred undoing of fixed form. We are not meant to remain static. These portraits are echoes of that truth—a study in dissolution, in trust, in the quiet beauty of the unformed. This is the continuation of sanctuary not as space, but as state.