Motherless Pietà: Fabric on form, January 2020.

This essay focuses on a small, overlooked courtyard near San Pietro in Rome, where a group of homeless men take refuge amid the daily flow of tourists visiting the basilica and its famous artworks, including Michelangelo's Pietà. The text contrasts the vulnerability and invisibility of these men—one of whom appears lifeless on a bench—with the reverent display of death and mourning inside the basilica, where popes lie embalmed and sculpted in marble as if peacefully asleep. It explores themes of visibility, human recognition, and the social and physical isolation experienced by those without shelter, highlighting the tension between public indifference and the sacred attention given to death within religious art and spaces.