Reflections on Incarnation, Mary and Women from the Bible at Norwich Cathedral.
Having seen Chris Gollon's paintings at Guildford during Christmastide last year it's thrilling to discover new levels of intimacy and challenge as they go on show here during Lent, into Holy Week and Easter. It's profoundly moving & exciting to see Canon Dr Peter Doll and others deepen this conversation. I want to say a few things about Chris's work, Julian of Norwich and what this exhibition might say as we gather here at the start of Lent.
Julian of Norwich
Chris Gollon 2013
Chris Gollon's work has a tremendous capacity to draw us into stories and moments that are unanswered & unresolved. These paintings capture sexuality & power, longing & loss, tenacity & exhaustion, tenderness & violence. Gollon pays attention to the detail: to little things; to nameless women and those women whose stories we think we know. His images compelling intimacy and the horror of brutality.
I'm not going to tell those stories for you: you can face them, read about them, ponder them. Chris invites us to pay attention with patience & endurance. In this exhibition we can't escape the cries, the faces, the physicality; the touch of hands; the bruised skin. He refuses to yield to a false optimism: he makes us wait with Hannah, Rachel, Mary, Judith and the women of Jerusalem. These are lives that are deeply particular yet their stories are cosmic in scale. Chris asks in the face of all these moments 'what is this?'
Julian of Norwich asks that same question: what is this? As David Tregunna has already said, her painting is especially apt for this show. She's a scholar and a theologian, writing in English; she's an anonymous woman who's named after a place. In the face of her own illness (and possible death), she had a vision of light and love. It is a vision of the divine. In the face of the complexity of humanity, our frailty and mortality her attention is drawn to a tiny object in the palm of her hand. She asks 'what is this?'. What sense to I make of this? What meaning to I find in this?
As she gazes on what in tradition is regarded as a hazelnut, she begins to contemplate the mystery of God - of the transcendent, the other, the beyond breaking into our brokenness. She realised that all that is made is loved and sustained by the love of God. The arch of that love takes us from delight creation, through the disruption of what we call sin or the fall, to the glimmer of consolation in God with us as infant and adult.
As we gather on the cusp of Lent our attention shifts from nativity to calvary; from birth to death.
As we make that move, Chris draws invites us to pay attention to an apple. As David has said, this is the first time the 'Madonna of the Apple has been shown. An apple in the hand of Eve: a symbol of temptation, misdirected desires, our human propensity to mess things up. An apple in the hand of Mary: a sign of redemption, self-giving love, God propensity to forgive and restore.
Madonna of the Apple
Chris Gollon 2012
Julian captures that arch of meaning - of a love that will not let us go; and the assurance that all shall be well. Chris invites us to inhabit that story afresh - allowing space to ask questions about loss and renewal, grief and gift; questions which are more spacious than answers.Tonight and over the coming weeks, we are drawn into the intimacy of seeing these face - paying attention to them; letting these paintings see us; waiting with them. And perhaps, we catch light in Hannah's wordless prayer; in Julian's serious attention; in Mary Magdalene's refusal to walk away; in Lucy's fearlessness; in a mother cradling a son in infancy and in death.
Perhaps moments such as these are less like endings, but new beginnings. Perhaps our stories will be woven into them. Perhaps we will catch a glimmer of hope and renewal that we come know, with baited breath, like a breaking dawn, as resurrection.
Thank you Chris for opening up this horizon that takes the story of incarnation and these women beyond words.
© 2015 Julie Gittoes
