SPIRIT & FLIGHT

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Spirit and Flight presents a visually and conceptually rich body of large scale works (each measuring between 2.5 and 3.0 metres). Diamond explores the relationship between physical navigation and inner psychological experience, when he engages with cities not simply as locations but as urban spaces charged with poetic and spiritual resonance. The project draws inspiration from Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence, particularly its use of intimate, museum-like narrative cabinets. This literary influence shapes Diamond’s structural approach, suggesting both a fictional and an archive of memories within this dreamlike body of work.

 

A central dimension of Spirit and Flight is Diamond’s lifelong neurological and ocular condition, which distorts visual perception. Rather than treating this as a limitation, he positions it as a defining component of his methodology—a perceptual reality that shapes how the world appears to him. His images emerge from this altered visual field, producing heightened sensory tension and an oscillation between disorientation and clarity. Diamond’s fragmented montages and triptych forms reinforce this nonlinear perceptual experience. These disrupted visual sequences echo his embodied movement through the city, where sensory overload and distortion are not obstacles but generative conditions. The urban environment becomes both alien and intimate, familiar yet estranged.

 

Ultimately, Spirit and Flight offers a deeply personal yet widely resonant reflection on perception, memory, and trauma. Diamond reframes visual impairment as a creative catalyst, transforming personal difficulty into a distinctive aesthetic language. The series challenges conventional assumptions about vision and representation, proposing instead a mode of seeing that is fractured, affective, and profoundly revealing.