Stephen Chambers printed this monotype in 2005 at the Scuola Internazionale di Grafica in Venice during a two week artist residency programme curated by Simon Marsh and Mike Taylor of Paupers Press. The artist worked intuitively, inspired by Venice with its peculiar urban landscape, lifestyle and artistic heritage to create a series of celebrated monotypes. In the making of these works, the image of a kneeling figure recurred in the artist’s mind. He reconnected it to the iconography of the ancient cycles of frescoes and paintings centred on St Ursula: “I went to the Gallerie dell’Accademia...Right at the end there is this set of very big paintings about St Ursula. In the painting of her death she’s kneeling down praying. Having already strangely plucked this image out of my head of a woman praying, here she was again,” explains Chambers. Her figure became central to this body of work and it gave the title The Martyrdom of St Ursula to the exhibition which followed. A delicate geometric pattern is etched on several of the works as a formal device, a "cosmic net" which "is also there to perplex. And it’s also there as stitching, tethering the image to the paper”.