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ART IN THE CATHEDRAL

Mark Bonney, Canon Treasurer (Wednesday 1st September 2010)

I am thrilled that from 11 September – 12 November the Cathedral will be the home of a very exciting exhibition Liminality: Towards the Unknown Region. Eight top sculptors have been invited to interpret this theme using the Cathedral as their inspiration and I’m sure the exhibition will be stunning. This exhibition is particularly exciting because it’s the first time for some years that we have initiated and hosted a large exhibition of this sort, and we are immensely grateful to Jacquiline Creswell (read more about her on page..) who recently joined the Exhibitions Committee to help us develop our exhibition work. This development has been a conscious move on the part of Chapter to be more focussed with our exhibition work. We recognise that the visual arts have an enormous capacity to speak of the transcendent and of the eternal; as well as the ability to challenge our perceptions of ourselves and the way we live – and in these senses visual art is profoundly spiritual. Recently Emily Young’s Angel Heads provided a wonderful end to our 750th anniversary, Robert Koenig’s Odyssey at the beginning of that year challenged us about the search for home and identity; Peter Eugene Ball’s work in its deceptive simplicity was at times humorous, but also evocative and timeless, as well as modern as the Madonna in the Trinity Chapel shows. Charlotte Mayer’s Thornflower in the Morning Chapel has raised our consciousness about the Holocaust and reconciliation and has been much reflected on by visitors and used in our schools’ work. It has been wonderful to have all these works with us, but Liminality will be the first time a number of different artists have responded to a clearly defined theme in relation to the sacred space that is Salisbury Cathedral. Writing in the Washington National Cathedral’s equivalent of Cathedral News Dean Sam Lloyd wrote earlier this year “halfway houses are what anthropologists call ‘liminal spaces’, places of openness and possibility outside the normal structures of life. In these in-between spaces pilgrims and seekers can encounter God, and even the unsuspecting can find him/herself, as the poet Larkin put it, ‘surprising/a hunger in himself to be more serious’”. We chose the theme of Liminality with that idea in mind of Cathedrals and sacred space as an in-between place, a place of possibility and encounter with that which is greater than ourselves. For many of our visitors the Cathedral is very much something outside their normal structures of life and we hope and pray these and other works of art may indeed inspire, challenge and provoke and thus make us more open to God and his creativity. The second half of the exhibitions title Toward the Unknown Region takes words from a Walt Whitman poem that link in with what this exhibition and much of our engagement with visual arts is about. The poem follows and may I suggest you ponder it and pray with it as you feel is appropriate? Darest thou now O soul, Walk out with me toward the unknown region, Where neither ground is for the feet nor any path to follow? No map there, nor guide, Nor voice sounding, nor touch of human hand, Nor face with blooming flesh, nor lips, are in that land. I know it not O soul, Nor dost thou, all is blank before us, All waits undream'd of in that region, that inaccessible land. Till when the ties loosen, All but the ties eternal, Time and Space, Nor darkness, gravitation, sense, nor any bounds bounding us. Then we burst forth, we float, In Time and Space O soul, prepared for them, Equal, equipt at last, (O joy! O fruit of all!) them to fulfill O soul.

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