The winter sunlight had burnt out by the time I reached the far side of Recoleta Cemetery yesterday, but somehow that is fitting. I was confronted by this Weeping Mary, half present, half fading away. Her ashen face merged with the drab apartments reflected from behind me, and the bricks of the stained glass were losing strength, too, until they melted into the ‘real’ walls.

Such pain in her expression, made universal by the connection with an archetypal block of flats – home to people I do not know, who will also have had their taste of sorrow. The artist has breathed such life into this window. Mary’s fingers have been stretched out until they look like the undulating roots of a tree. The folds of her headdress create a seedling, or perhaps a slender branch, sprouting up from her cheekbone. That’s how I see it anyway. There is hope growing beneath the surface.