Be Still, My Heart stages a clay-like form bound tightly with string, set within the pared-down architectural stage that characterizes Ginny Casey’s recent work. At first glance, the figure reads as an object in a ceramics studio - a lump of material under constraint, part of Casey’s larger world where vessels and clay serve as metaphors for interiority. Yet the form hovers between vessel and body: its torso-like contour and taut binding suggest a mannequin or figure under duress.

This ambiguity lends the painting a psychological charge. The string both cuts into and defines the form, evoking the way discipline or restriction can paradoxically give rise to shape, order, and even transcendence. One might think of religious practices that embrace constraint - flagellation, asceticism - as paths to higher enlightenment. In this way, the painting situates itself within a long history of art exploring the tension between suffering and sublimation.

Art-historically, the work resonates with Louise Bourgeois’s tied, bandaged, and bodily forms, where fragility and violence interlace. But Casey’s approach is more restrained: the clay-pink form is neither grotesque nor sentimental, but monumental in its stillness. The shallow, boxed-in space around it amplifies its vulnerability, while the lush matte handling of color makes the form strangely tender. What emerges is a charged emblem of containment and interior life - at once sculptural, bodily, and spiritual.