 Living Tryons is a body of work that I made over a 10-year period in western China in a region called the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region and the work is mostly photographs made at holy sites for saints, Sufi saints, and I focused on the markers that people created when they go on pilgrimage. I went to a holy site and I didn't realize that it was a holy site. I didn't realize what it was. I was very moved by the physical handmade nature of the markers and for me I was in the desert and it was a very spiritual experience to see these markers. They had so much life to them and although I didn't know what I was looking at I thought I have a feeling this is deeply spiritual and I really wanted to learn more about it, both visually and in terms of what they were there for. The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region has 11 million Uyghur people. They practice a form of Islam largely that is influenced by Sufism or is considered Sufism and in the practice that they do in this region there is saint veneration so a lot of the holy sites are pilgrimage sites for saints so they're Muslim saints and they're saints that might have been great poets, great proselytizers. They often were able to perform miracles during their lifetime pure illness. It's believed that a saint never dies and they're in a state of eternal sleep so a lot of the markers that you're looking at are for saints or for venerations close to this. There's very little knowledge about Xinjiang so before I actually went there myself I had never myself heard of the Uyghurs and I hadn't known about the region in fact the Taklamakan Desert which is huge I had never heard of it so I thought well that's I'm not the only one in fact as I've made this work for a very long time many people had never heard of the Uyghurs so I think that in itself was really interesting and as I made the work and presented it to the public I realized a lot of what I was doing was presenting a different perspective than the one that has reached the west. The strength of this work is is the sort of magic the sort of awe of what it is and the discovery process of finding out what it is what it's been used for in the history related to that practice. What's so exciting about having SOAS was that it had a personal connection to Lisa this was the place where she first met the Uyghur scholar in 2004 and in 2014 she came back to SOAS and did another conference here and I think that that link to SOAS is really ideal. What was interesting to me was this idea that that these things were intentionally placed that they're in a lot of the photos they look like they're growing they look like they're sprouting from the earth and they're alive and and that power of of being alive relates so much to the spirituality and for me that was really interesting and something that I felt needed to be sort of unpacked and so for me as a curator I really wanted people to sort of be able to to learn what these were and to sort of have an experience as both a personal and spiritual experience but also a bit of an educational experience because for for what I think a lot of people aren't familiar with this region and the kind of shrines that exist in the desert. The exhibition was shown at the Rubin Museum in New York it was shown in France as part of the photography festival in Aurore overlapping with London and SOAS the exhibition is going to be at a museum in Sweden called Fotografseken. I would love to see this exhibition travel to China I think that many Han Chinese are very interested in learning more about the Uyghur and I think I think it would be very well received.