In a 1984 artist statement, Gleeson wrote:

I'm always fascinated by the ambiguity of matter — things that look like one thing and could be something else. The flesh and stone or brick seemed to me to be opposites that somehow combined. This gives a strange intensity to the image. There is the idea of a vein of blood, a hose of blood, life-force, flood of blood, I don't know what it is — something to do with continuity. The hand of God — with the hose coming into the head.

Information supplied by Renee Free, AGNSW, Oct. 1992.