I'm an atheist now but Quakerism was the first time as a child I came across a religious structure that made some sense … the silence, contemplation, the acknowledgement of our responsibilities not just to each other but also to nature, they are pacifists.

[4] Late one night in 1988, the 19-year-old Rachel Howard was waiting for a bus outside London’s Goldsmiths College with a stack of her paintings, having spent the evening in the student union bar, when she was approached by two scruffy characters offering to carry the canvases back to her digs.

[14] Possible instruments of death are depicted – a pair of scissors, a ladder, as well as the symbolic, lone Black Dog (a common metaphor for depression, coined by 18th Century writer Samuel Johnson[15]).

Then there are the faceless figures; many hang from ropes, while the body of a woman lying across a bed recalls the psychosexual claustrophobia of Walter Sickert.

[11] Howard's figures are on the verge of disappearing completely, dangerously close to ceasing to exist even as an image, slipping away from the canvas's representation: all that remains is the macabre trace of a body, almost as immaterial as a shadow cast upon an empty room.

[14]Sue Hubbard wrote of the series in The Independent: The creation of these ambitious canvases is a psychological and physical battle, which demonstrates that there is still a role for emotionally articulate art that has something important to say about the poignancy and tragedy of the human condition.

[16] Via Dolorosa, Latin for 'Way of Suffering', is the name of a street within the Old City of Jerusalem, believed to be the path that Jesus walked, bearing the cross, towards his crucifixion.

While Howard's fourteen paintings reference The Passion, the creation of the series was in fact provoked by one of the most shocking photographs to emerge from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

A publication accompanies the work with texts by art historian and curator Joachim Pissarro and Shami Chakrabarti.

[19] It is this idea of limitlessness that Howard seeks to engage with, the belief that human suffering is never-ending, hence the name of the work – Repetition is Truth.

Monumental, quiet, graceful, discrete, luscious, restrained and yet, at the same time, forceful, masterful, deafening – these paintings yield more layers of emotions than one can absorb all at once.