This Meaning knows me
Seven selected works from 2020-2024
Mystery, Meaning, littleness, and indestructible Love
Each of these seven paintings, five gilded and two large carved and painted works, aim to be signposts pointing onward. One can dwell with them, one can slowly move in and through them, yet my sincere hope is that they do not become a final destination, an end in themselves. Rather, that they point on into mystery and toward meaning, meaning with a name.
Since taking up the use of metal leaf (golds of differing alloys, copper, silver) in 2021 a rich visual shift has taken place. Having utilised iridescent pigments for many years, it was a welcome surprise how potently vibrant metal leaf was compared to metallic pigment suspended in binder. Layered over the painted wood panels, the elements involved in the gilding process (size, leaf, and lacquer) have added visual and material depth, yet my hope is in their renewed capacity to guide one into wonder, a work being a small, finite, humble object that opens a path to an honest encounter, of awe and of trust. Two of the panels, This Meaning knows me (2019-2023) and Pledge of inheritance (2015-2024), were gilded after some years of lying dormant, as if awaiting this stage of the process, to be clothed in their wedding garment. The two final works were completed soon before learning how to gild, Trust (2020) and Peter’s tears (2021), whose deep, slow process is revealed with the intensive carving into the substrate, pointing to the lifelong pursuit of seeking, of pursuing meaning amid mystery.
Drawing upon Sacred Scripture and reflections upon it both ancient and new, titles are married to materials in the hope of aiding this pursuit, of the seeking of the face of this mystery, this meaning. From the description of the concrete manifestation of mystery in the first chapter of St Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, in the case of Pledge of inheritance (2015-2024), to St Augustine’s acknowledgement of the greatness of virtue even in the most ordinary circumstances, To be faithful in a little thing is a great thing (hidden mystery) (2023-2024) in his De Doctrina Christiana (Book IV Chapter 18), the words of the titles and the material manifestation of the work sing of each other’s good, and then in unison sing outward and onward toward Good itself. The title of this small grouping, as well as that of the central, fourth work, This Meaning knows me (2019-2023), is drawn from Joseph Ratzinger’s radio addresses from the late 1960’s that were later published as Faith and the Future:
Christian faith is the finding of a “you” that upholds me and amid all the unfulfilled - and in the last resort unfulfillable - hope of human encounters gives me the promise of an indestructible love that not only longs for eternity but also guarantees it. Christian faith lives on the discovery that not only is there such a thing as objective meaning but that this meaning knows me and loves me, that I can entrust myself to it like the child who knows that everything he may be wondering about is safe in the “you” of his mother.[1]
Gilded in moon gold leaf over its face and bordered on its sides with red gold leaf, this work visually sings into these reflections of Ratzinger’s. The light reflected from the moon is a sure, tangible sign of hope, a promise, in the sun’s presence, albeit the smallest sliver of a waning crescent, or the memory of it in the dark shroud of the new moon. One is then, too, induced to wonder over the inherent beauty of the lunar light, reflecting the glory of its source, guiding, encouraging one through the remaining night hours until the embrace of the warm light of dawn, the rising Sun.
[1] Joseph Ratzinger (later Benedict XVI), Faith and the Future (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2019), 33.
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