Carvings found in Wakefield cathedral.
Because of the work I have been undertaking with patients at Pinderfields hospital, I have been going to Wakefield on a fairly regular basis and one day decided to pop into the cathedral. The carvings that surround the choir stalls particularly fascinated me, because they represent a much older form of spiritual awareness than the Cathedral itself. The carvings are of human plant hybrids, what are often called green men and they were made approximately 500 years ago. Christian churches were often built on sites of previously spiritual significance for the local population and I suspect the site at Wakefield was similar and that for one reason or another a local tradition of some sort of vegetation/tree spirit inhabiting perhaps shaman type figures, was still hanging on when the carvings were made.
The suppression of local beliefs associated with Christianity continues, its missionary tradition going alongside often political oppression. Barthélémy Toguo, in his image “Homo Planta I” (2018), suggests that in effect Christians crucify the Gods and spirits they find, in the name of Jesus.
Barthélémy Toguo, “Homo Planta I” (2018)
Barthélémy Toguo’s fluid ink drawing “Homo Planta I” also reflects on Cameroon’s history. The people were often forced to labour in plantations in order to support an international trade in vegetable products, such as cacao, rubber, palm oil, and bananas. Toguo creates an image of a human forced into a crucified posture, punctuated by nails. Unlike traditional Christian crucifixions the sap from the trees still flows and is exchanged with the blood of the body, a transferal of energies from plant into human. It is if an older tradition is reasserting itself, the original crucifixion, it reminds us, was itself an echo of a previous religion, whereby humans were sacrificed and their blood cast onto the soil, so that plant life would grow. Toguo is also aware that Cameroon’s rainforest is also threatened by non-indiginous plantations, it is in effect being crucified too.
Take a green breath: Lithograph
Toguo has studios Paris and Bandjoun in Cameroon and in 2009 he set in place Bandjoun Station, an artist colony and coffee plantation. Home-grown coffee is sold in packets wrapped in the artist’s lithographs, highlighting the value of Africa’s natural resources. Toguo stated at the time, “We consider that it is not up to the West to fix the prices of our raw materials,”
The animal plant hybrid is a form I often return to, it reminds me of how we are inextricably interwoven into the matrix of materials, other animals and plant lives that consist of the earth we live on. To see ourselves fused with vegetation is a timely reminder that we cannot exist on our own and that it is plants that do all the hard work in terms of capturing energy from the sun's rays and converting it into an energy source that we can digest.
A memory of little weed
Many years ago when I was a child, I watched the animated children's program Bill and Ben, the titled leads were themselves as 'flowerpot men', inanimate objects given anthropomorphic form and their friend and all seeing neighbour was 'little weed', another vegetable/human hybrid. This experience I suspect, set into my early mind a predilection to see animist possibilities in non-human forms, something many ancient cultures were prone to believe in.
In my current work as an artist I feel that I need to re-establish a return to types of thinking that reconnect us to the world and to help us to have some sort of dialogue with a fast disappearing natural landscape, a dialogue that would see us listening to nature's needs, rather than demanding of it, "what can you give me?"
I have spent most of today walking the landscape of West Wittering and simply drawing the vegetation around me. If you begin your philosophy by stressing the importance of looking at a leaf and drawing it, that philosophy will of course argue for a close relationship between humans and nature. This was where John Ruskin began his philosophic journey and who am I to argue with him.
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