Witnesses of the invisible

Perhaps artists are meant to be witnesses of the invisible and that our role in society is to keep a door open to alternative possibilities. For instance, when the Pope died recently it did seem from what was said in his obituaries, that he had valued art as a vehicle that could both transcend boundaries and communicate to a wide audience. 

He also apparently thought that the artist could be a witness and that the work of art is a strong proof that incarnation is possible. I presumed he had believed that an artwork could embody or carry within itself an idea of the spiritual. By doing so, the artwork would then open out a possibility or doorway, through which a person could enter into an embodiment of the divine. Art becoming a passage or encounter, that can help someone to pass on from their every day materiality to a belief in a higher spirituality. 

Hilma af Klint

Georgia Houghton

Our present society does seem in need of a spiritual infusion. Some of the artists that have recently being brought back to our attention and have received critical acclaim perhaps reflect this need. Georgia Houghton was a British artist who, in the 1860s, began to produce automatic drawings, which she claimed were guided by spirits. Her watercolours and coloured pencil drawings are intricate and delicate, including complex geometric patterns interspersed with flower type forms. Although ignored during her lifetime she has recently been brought back into the attention of the art world, because researchers are looking to rebalance the art canon by finding more women artists but there has also been an upsurge in interest in artists that 'dared' to approach the spiritual seriously. Much of this research has been driven by the rediscovery of the work of Hilma af Klint. 

Georgia Houghton: Glory be to God: 1868

Agnes Pelton is another artist who has been re-discovered, her work is though much closer in sensibility to contemporary artists than the work of Houghton. 

Agnes Pelton: Winter 1933

Agnes Pelton: Star Gazer: 1929

I suspect her formal sensibility was as much one in tune with Disney as it was with the work of Madame Blavatsky. Even so her images still resonate as spiritual doorways. 

From Bambi: 1942

Walt Disney developed some totally non figurative scenes for Fantasia and his interests clearly overlap with the interests of several mystics from the time. The saturated colours that were typical of animation at the time and the abstracts were not that far away from those envisioned by Besant and Leadbeter in 'Thought Forms' 

From Fantasia: 1940

From 'Thought Forms' 1905

Lindsay Kokoska contemporary spiritual artist and AI user is typical of a new generation of creators who are seeking to provide art that supports this contemporary need. Although too 'cosmic' and cliched for my own taste, I can understand why her work is popular and it is fulfilling a need in a much more healthy way than the practices of some of the new wave religious movements or a return to the re-establishment of the old values of the Abrahamic religions, the followers of which are still creating havoc right across the world.  

Lindsay Kokoska

Kokoska's work is also inspired by visions of Quantum Entanglement and she creates immersive environments, within which you might practice yoga or meditate. 

Lindsay Kokoska

The recent Bodyscapes exhibition in Barcelona is an example of how a contemporary sensibility is developing in relation to these issues.

Christy Lee Rogers

Bodyscapes at the Load Gallery, looked at how artists approach the body not as an object, but as a mutable environment shaped by experience and emotions but perhaps more importantly it focused on artists using new technology and those providing immersive experiences. I was reminded of our historic use of glowing stained glass art within dark churches and the need to make candle lit images in caves.

Christy Lee Rogers

There is a tendency to poo poo these types of responses to our contemporary world as being naive but I'm personally reassured that at least there is an attempt to develop ways of working that acknowledge a spiritual need. I also think that it is no accident that all the artists in the Bodyscapes exhibition were like Hilma af Klint and Georgia Houghton women. The hard to acknowledge fact in the centre of this is for myself, a realisation that AI will become more and more present in every aspect of our lives. In this case it is AI that is driving the imagery of artists such as Lindsay Kokoska. It is reaching out into all of the cosmic imagery available and checking out at what speed to project movement, what sorts of colours to ensure a spiritual experience and as it does, whatever information is collected together is digitally remembered, so that if I wanted to, I too could access AI and ask for it to provide me with cosmic imagery designed to tap into our emotive need for spiritual nourishment. Is this the future? Will we in time simply ask an invisible interface to provide us with a spiritual experience and lo and behold, there it will be, all ready for us to step into? Is this too what we need to witness as artists?

The original people who have inhabited Australia for thousands of years have their own answer to a need for cosmic imagery. If you stare at the night sky long enough, you may begin to see what they saw. Especially if you live in the southern hemisphere where the stars cluster together with a magnificence never glimpsed in northern skies. 

The Emu and the Milky Way

One of the most familiar sights in the Southern night sky is the Milky Way, its dark body stretches the length of our awareness of the galaxy we belong to. In the stories of the original inhabitants of Australia, this shape is that of a gigantic Emu. The sky for them is not just a place for stars but is a reflection of the Earth, it holds stories and astronomical observations that remind the peoples that can communicate with it, of astronomical phenomena like eclipses, practical guidance for living such as the differences in climate associated with changes in the year and even as a map to guide directions for travel; these ancient knowledge systems being far more sophisticated that we often imagine.

An Aboriginal tale tells a story of the rage of the Brolga bird, who one day during an argument with emu over who's chicks were the most beautiful, in a temper picked up and hurled emu's egg into the sky. In those days the sky was the home of the cloud man and emu's egg smashed into his wood pile and as it did, it burst into flames, throwing light and warmth down to the earth below and the cloud man has let it burn ever since. We now call that old wood pile the sun. In such a tale everyday things are transformed into cosmic events, the more sophisticated we think we are, the less some of us see such moments of wonder, but if we are to stay attuned to the cosmos that surrounds us, we need to keep our minds open to alternative possibilities

See also:

Embrace insignificance 

Drawing and spirituality

Diagrams: Visualising the invisible

Michael Kenny: Drawings for Easter

AI and drawing

On AI and disegno

Drawing with light

Bill Viola

Para-scientific visions and Rayonism

Lindsa

Nina Simone's Gum

The hair clippings of St Clare of Assisi, the Basilica of Saint Clare: Assisi.

'Nina Simone's Gum' is a book by Warren Ellis. Entitled after the fact that Ellis had pulled the gum off the leg of a piano Nina Simone had played back in 1999, in what was to be Simone's last performance in England. It was twenty years later put on display as a relic; an object of great spiritual value; the book being about how something so small can form such powerful connections between people, it is, as the blurb says, 'a story about the meaning we place on things, on experiences, and how they become imbued with spirituality'. 

Nina Simone's Gum

I went to see Nina Simone at Birmingham Town Hall in 1969, she was astonishing. Memories of the event still move me, and when she sang 'Young Gifted and Black', I remember hairs standing up on the back of my neck as the mainly black audience rose to her words. It was my first real experience of what it meant to have a very different identity to that of a white, male anglo-saxon. I had just accepted things as they were, but on going to art college, I was finally beginning to wake up and discover that the world out there was a conflicted place and that what I took for granted, was a situation many others would see as a position of privilege.  Simone's performance was an unforgettable experience and I could easily see why something as humble as her discarded chewing gum could be so important to someone who had attended one of her concerts. 

This is how relics work. Objects become the repositories of the spirit of the person who was associated with them. This could be, as in the image that opens this post, a saint like Clare of Assisi, who's still golden shorn hair is kept to remind us of her piety or Jesus Christ; the nails from his crucifixion being energised with some sort of spiritual essence of his being. 

A Holy nail relic: Trier Cathedral 

But you don't have to be that special or saintly, anyone's spiritual essence can be passed on using a relic, the most common situation being when you are given an urn full of ashes after a cremation. I know of several families that keep their grandad's ashes in an urn sitting in a cupboard and every now and again they turn to those ashes and ask for grandad's help in supporting them through life's difficulties. The objects that become relics can also be very mundane, a tooth, a nail, a used discarded chewing gum, but in their very banality, they tell us a story about life, about how the most humble, overlooked object, has the potential to give physical form to spiritual things. 

The artist Alina Szapocznikow, used to use chewing gum to make sculptural ideas, and then photograph the results. 

Alina Szapocznikow, “Photosculpture” (1971)

These images also tap into the concept of the relic. The artist's traces becoming very like those of a lost saint, Szapocznikow's chewed and hand pulled tiny sculptures, now venerated as high art, become relics not unlike the ones we find preserved in glass vitrines in many Catholic churches. A relic works as some sort of externalised mind. Without their physical presence we would find it very difficult to think about the ideas associated with what relics stand for. The reason we need to make physical objects to carry our ideas, is because of the same reason, each art object in effect operating as an externalised thought, a concept made real, rather than remaining as a thought trapped inside a head.

You can also think about a drawing once it is completed as a type of relic. Its very materiality is a crystallised idea. We are intrigued by an original drawing and as we look closely at its hand made marks, we recreate in our minds the artist's touch and in turn we are touched by the idea of a certain combination of materials holding within itself an idea. When I am dead my drawings will have to talk for me. Mute like all relics, people will bring their own stories to them, therefore I hope my works on paper will have enough substance to them to allow for many possible stories to emerge and flourish, the drawings' very muteness hopefully offering others a silence within which to make their own sounds. 

A drawing from an old sketchbook

Whatever idea I had when making this drawing I have forgotten, but the specific combination of materials remain, the drawing holds its form, only slightly distorted by time, perhaps a little faded and the paper slightly flattened due to compression and dampness. It now operates as a relic, a frozen thought preserved in paper and ink, a type of fossil. If now framed behind glass and put on display, the framing begins to remove it even further from the world and heightens its iconic possibilities and begins the journey towards becoming a reliquary.

The frame within a frame

An empty reliquary frame 

The empty reliquary frame above is just waiting for a saint's toe or tooth to be mounted within its ornate surrounds. It is designed to give honorific value to whatever is placed within it. It needs something like Nina Simone's gum to complete it. In fact the gum was cast in silver by Hannah Upritchard, a London jeweller and the Belgian fashion designer Ann Demeulemeester produced an intricately carved silver ring in its image. 

Hannah Upritchard: Silver casts of Nina Simone's Gum

I suppose this sequence of ideas has come to me because I'm about to retire and the library at Leeds Arts University is thinking of archiving some of my old sketchbooks. If they do and as I would hope, they keep them safe, one day they will seem to some future researcher as strange old relics of the past and my life will be a distant memory. It is unlikely I will have ever changed anyone's life in the way Nina Simone did, but on a more modest scale, perhaps some of my teaching or my drawings did help some people enrich their own lives and if anything of mine could be regarded as repositories of my spirit, it would be my sketchbooks.

Sketchbook idea evolving in relation to how my varicose veins feel

Glass leg votive in progress

See also: 

Bill Viola and Michelangelo

Drawing and spirituality

Drawing and life

Alina Szapocznikow

SKETCH

Sketchbooks

False starts Exhibition: An aspect of my work that reaches into the tradition of the votive

The votives project