Andrew Hazewinkel ceramic sculpture

Across many cultures, psychopomps are the liminal, transcendental, spirit-entities that without judgement meet and guide the souls of the recently deceased to the afterlife.

The term psychopomp - most often encountered in mythological, ritual and religious contexts - derives from the ancient Greek word psychopompós (ψυχοπομπός) a compound of psyche (ψυχή), meaning ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’, and pompos (πομπός), meaning ‘guide’ or ‘conductor’.

Hazewinkel’s ongoing corpus of psychopomps ( currently numbering approximately thirty-five) blends conceptions of ebodiment and transcedence with approaches to human and non-human figuration mingling our proprioceptive, lived-in understanding of our ephemeral bodies with the slippery ineffability of spirit realms.

^{Photographed by Giorgos Vitsaropoulos}