Art and Christianity Part One - Artwork

I have been troubled that I had not responded to a couple of Meme requests back in 2009 so am now trying to catch up and Epiphany is a good day to give this post.

This Meme was started by Jonathan Evens and his proposal is here:

To list an artwork, drama, piece of music, novel, and poem that you think each express something of the essence of Christianity and for each one explain why. Then tag five other people.

Artwork: Antony Gormley 'Field for the British Isles'

I have actually been working on it for a while, it took a lot longer than I imagined when I first saw I had been tagged. Therefore I have decided to split the sections across five posts in this order:

Artwork: Antony Gormley - 'Field for the British Isles'
Drama: Film 'Chariots of Fire' (1981)
Music: J S Bach - St Matthew Passion
Novel: Victoria Hislop - The Island
Poem: Wilfred Owen - The Parable of the Old Man and the Young

I was privileged to stumble across Antony Gormley's 'Field for the British Isles' installation at The British Museum when my son was in theatre undergoing major surgery at Great Ormond Street hospital 7 years ago in 2002. Was just wandering around in a daze and landed up in the museum... was horrified at the vandalism our imperial nation had casued to many locations in the name of archaeology, what wicked crimes? Then there in the central Great Court was Gormley's 'Fields'... totally amazing!

I will never forget it, the sea of faces that so reflected humanity looking up at me and with the emotion of the day it all caught up with me. It felt like I was God! There I could see 'all people that on earth do dwell' and had abundant compassion and love for all of them, light clay, dark clay, large, small, friendly, angry, happy, sad, quirky, whatever. I had no favourites, in my strange mental state it was as though each were my son and not inamimate objects. Part of this was each piece was unique, individually created by a volunteer from a starting point of simply being given a ball of clay and basic instructions.

I am so grateful this moment happened, I might have steered clear of potential crowds had I known beforehand. It helped to ease the agony of wondering how my boy was at that very time, a spiritual distraction!

Read more about the 'Fields' project here.

Despite the risk he has already been nobbled I tag: Mike Todd

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Of All The People In All The World at Greenbelt...

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(Photographed by Samuel Banks)

This year at the Greenbelt Festival I made it a personal mission to check out more about physical art as well as the usual reasons I go. The latter are, primarily, for the edifying and inspiring talks, the music and, additionally, for all the 'chance' encounters whether they be with folk you already know or complete strangers.

One of the first and most talked about pieces of art, more of a complete and dynamic installation, was the display in the Christian Aid tent by Stan's Café entitiled 'Of All The People In All The World'. This inspiring and challenging piece is based on a grain of rice to represent a person and from there piles of rice to represent various juxtaposed worldwide statistics. Seeing this brings into stark focus our Western unbalanced World View. Click to expand the picture above to see the largest heap of rice represents all the people who have died in the Congo since the conflict began in 1998, the medium sized pile to the right is the number of civilian deaths in Iraq since 2001 and the adjacent relatively tiny pile represents all the forces' casualties in Afghanistan (again since 2001).

I also attended one of the panels discussing use of Art as part of Alternative Worship which was also inpsiring but I will return to that again as they dissed the use of music because of the conflicts that are raised between using traditional and modern worship stuff... the short answer is use pop music as well as hymns, see here!

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On a more general level the whole Greenbelt 2009 site had lots of complementary 'vibing' which just seemed more complete this year from the start of the festival along with some very accessible (in every sense of the word!) sculptures.

So, myth one about Greenbelt dispelled, GB is NOT just a music festival!

Under Grace...

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At the age of 70 the sculptor William E. deGarthe set about 'releasing' the figures contained in this massive block of granite (~100 feet wide) in his back yard in Peggy's Cove, Nova Scotia. He named it the 'Fisherman's Monument' and reading from Right to Left (click to enlarge so you can check the detail) the piece is in three joined sections. The first section represents WORK, all about the fishermen and depicts them all working together. The second, middle part he called BOUNTY showing the riches of the sea and the final area is dominated by the angel figure, GRACE, the 'guardian angel watching over a fisherman and his family'.