The cartography of the mental is as complicated and as flexible as life demands of us: what we remember in one way today can be different tomorrow, and the day after that perhaps we may even remember something we had previously forgotten. The geography of memory is in motion: the submerged and the abandoned, the newly built and the renovated are in a process of constant exchange . . . Sasportas’s geographical thinking paces out a space that essentially resists all control. Emotions cannot be planned, they unfold, are transported, they erupt, overwhelm, agitate, monopolize . . . (Christina Vegh, ‘Intimate Revolt: Cartography of the Mental/On the work of Yehudit Sasportas’)

Yehudit Sasportas, ‘The Golden Lake’ (2005)

Ungainly academic phraseology aside, we certainly require a map to navigate our way through the mental landscape of the Cavelight exhibition. But since memory is not linear or uniform and has a habit of overlapping and replicating itself, so too does the ‘cartography’ of the exhibition represent what the artist refers to as ‘the archive of her Unconscious’. In her interpretation, unconscious memory (of which most of us are unaware) duplicates itself – refracting and reflecting images and perspectives, warping and bending, turning inward and outward – an inner world in which dreams and reality blend and merge.

Sasportas is well attuned to the potency of myth and symbolism when reading her work.Although her pieces are not consciously ‘religious’, they are highly charged with what Mircea Eliade called ‘the sense of The Sacred’ and Rudolph Otto named ‘the idea of the Holy’ or ‘Numinous Consciousness’. The grandeur and sublimity of the images that made up the exhibition may be encapsulated in two of startling quality: ‘The Golden Lake’ (2005) and ‘The Cavelight’ (2005). A theologian such as Otto obviously did not believe that ‘numinous consciousness’ could be ‘taught’ but only ‘awakened’ via direct experience, through a sense of apprehending ‘the invisible’, ‘the eternal’ ‘the supernatural’ or ‘the transcendent’. As I gazed at the ‘Cavelight’ diptych, at the still waters of the mountain pool flanked by the everdarkening crowd of sentinels with their shadowy branches, I recalled the concluding passage of The Golden Bough (1922) by Sir James Frazer. Although a catalogue of human frailty, superstition and pathos in the face of Awesome Nature, the book ends on a note of uplifting splendour. Then, as now, I feel that in her pen and ink drawing Yehudit Sasportas captured almost precisely the visual ‘sense of the sacred’ conveyed by Frazer’s words:

Our long voyage of discovery is over and our bark has drooped her weary sails in port at last. Once more we take the road to Nemi. It is evening, and as we climb the long slope of the Appian Way up to the Alban Hills,we look back and see the sky aflame with sunset, its golden glory resting like the aureole of a dying saint over Rome and touching with a crest of fire the dome of St Peter’s.The sight once seen can never be forgotten,but we turn from it and pursue our way darkling along the mountain side, till we come to Nemi and look down on the lake in its deep hollow, now fast disappearing in the evening shadows. The place has changed but little since Diana received the homage of her worshippers in the sacred grove. The temple of the sylvan goddess, indeed, has vanished and the King of the Wood no longer stands sentinel over the Golden Bough. But Nemi’s woods are still green, and as the sunset fades above them in the west, there comes to us, borne on the swell of the wind the sound of the church bells of Rome ringing the Angelus. Ave Maria! Sweet and solemn they chime out from the distant city and die lingeringly away across the wide Campagnan marshes. Le roi est mort, vive le roi! Ave Maria!

Confronted with a higher reality, Plato’s fugitive could have fled back into the labyrinthine recesses of his underworld den.Yet this is not what happens. Once the cognitive leap over the abyss of Unknowing has been taken, it can never be undone. For Plato, Fraser, Hesse and now Sasportas, the exploration of consciousness – although a weary journey fraught with pain and sadness – is also the path to knowledge of the river’s ‘secrets’, the ascent of the Soul towards the Transcendent.

Samuel Klein received an MA in History of Art from University College London following a degree in Theology and Philosophy of Religion from Jesus College, Cambridge. A lecturer and writer on theology and the arts, he also represents emerging contemporary artists and has worked with leading galleries in London and Israel, most recently the Victoria Miro Gallery.