Exhibition for Holy Week

LAURA GASCOIGNE

Behold the Man of Sorrows An original exhibition during Lent in a Welsh country church of the 14 Stations of the Cross each created by a different artist is drawing visitors from far and wide to the highly individual perspective of the story of the Crucifixion that they portray

Half a mile from Offa’s Dyke, in a hamlet called Discoed – Welsh for “under the wood” – stands the little Norman border church of St Michael. With its nearby spring, ancient yews and circular churchyard, the foundation may date back to the Welsh “Age of Saints” between the fifth and sixth centuries. Today its congregation numbers 15, a good turnout for a village of 10 houses. But during Lent, this former shepherds’ church in south Herefordshire has been drawing visitors from far beyond its parish boundaries. Wales and its borders are well provided with artists’ studios, and last year the chairman of the Friends of Discoed Church, David Hiam, decided to tap into this creative potential. He teamed up with local artist Charles MacCarthy to commission an unusual series of the Stations of the Cross. The idea was for 14 different artists to paint one Station each, drawing their subjects from a hat. To attract good artists – there was no funding – it would be a selling exhibition, with a third of the proceeds going to Freedom from Torture.

Since the exhibition’s opening on Shrove Tuesday (until 15 April), the response from the local community has been extraordinary. Every Thursday during Lent, the vicar of St Michael’s, the Revd Steve Hollinghurst, has read a meditation before two of the paintings. An Anglican community has been visiting from a neighbouring parish, while the vicar of another has asked to borrow the Stations next year – a problem, as three have already sold.

But the strongest impact has been on the artists themselves. Although most of them have an interest in religion – four belong to a group called Art & the Spirit – doctrinally speaking, they’re a mixed bag. They include an atheist, a Buddhist and, somewhere in between, “a questioning Christian of the Anglican tradition, slightly itinerant”. In a parish that once prided itself on having no resident “Papist or reputed Papist”, they also include a Catholic, and have chosen to illustrate Pope John Paul II’s Scriptural Way of the Cross.

Artistically speaking, too, they are a broad church, drawing on sources from the Italian primitives to Pop. While Charles MacCarthy’s Second Station, Jesus is Betrayed by Judas, pays homage to Giotto, his son Dan MacCarthy has based his Eighth Station, Jesus is Helped by Simon the Cyrenian to Carry the Cross, on a 2010 news photograph of the arrest of Colton Harris-Moore, the “Barefoot Bandit”, whose two-year flight from American justice acquired the status of myth. The artist found a “messianic quality” in the bowed pose of the shackled, barefoot youth, and the addition of a small, surprisingly frail Simon the Cyrenian and the suggestion of a cross completed the picture.

A more convulsive news event provided the background for Susannah Fiennes’ Third Station, Jesus Is Condemned by the Sanhedrin. Fiennes was living in New York in 2001 when on a fine September morning she noticed a group of workmen in yellow hard hats on the roof opposite reacting with theatrical gestures of horror to something she couldn’t see. For a decade since 9/11, she has been exploring “the geometry of emotion” in her private work. Her cloth-capped Jesus, based on drawings of her forester husband carrying wood, passes so close to the picture plane that the crossbar of his crucifix might hit us: the triangle it forms with the vertical frames two small figures of the Sanhedrin in the distance. Their agitated gestures are insignificant; his quiet concentration is momentous. “I’m interested in the symbolism of carrying a weight: the bowed head and the raised arm,” says Fiennes. “It’s literally loaded.”

A different sense of being weighed down pervades Allison Neal’s interpretation of the Seventh Station, Jesus Bears the Cross. Instead of a live model, Neal based her Jesus on a lifesized Victorian lay figure, depicted plodding on through empty space, apparently shedding bits of broken limbs as it goes. In place of a cross, it carries a knapsack. A former convent schoolgirl, now an atheist, Neal was reminded of “all those hymns in assemblies saying ‘take up thy cross’. That seemed to me to be the

Tenth Station: Jesus is Crucified, stained glass, by Nicola Hopwood. Photo: Alex Ramsay hinge of the story, where he makes the decision.” The knapsack was for “all the things we carry about, physically and emotionally”.

In Neal’s secular version of the story, the journeying figure is “choosing, deciding and moving forward; it’s about the decisions, the decisions we make or don’t make”. In the Christian version, its gradual shedding of life’s baggage is a process beginning in Gethsemane and ending on the Cross in Thomas Merton’s “point of nothingness … which belongs entirely to God”.

The idea of physical extinction is central to Lois Hopwood’s Fourteenth Station, Jesus is Placed in the Tomb: “It’s that Saturday of nothing: that sort of death.” For Hopwood, the references in Matthew to clean linen and a stone tomb evoked visual memories of a dismantled tomb in the crypt of Hereford Cathedral with a hollow where the sculpted body had been, and of terracotta-stained sheets from her husband’s pottery hanging on a line. The recollections came together in her Rothkoesque painting of a long, narrow strip of translucent white, frayed red at the edges, floating inside a black and blue frame.

“I wanted to express the sadness and stillness of the white cloth covering a broken body in the darkness of the stone tomb,” says Hopwood. Yet the picture’s vertical axis could also suggest something else: a dark doorway lit by a blinding white light as a shrouded, transfigured form emerges.

For stained glass artist Nicola Hopwood (no relation), the verbal stimulus lay in the

4 | THE TABLET | 31 March 2012 simple words, “Jesus Is Crucified”. The immediacy of their present tense prompted her pared-down image of a tiny crucified Christ in a glowing colour-field of darkening poppyred glass, apparently suspended in space and time. She omitted the two thieves from the Tenth Station because “something in me wanted to maintain the sense of immense aloneness”.

That solitude is still more keenly felt in the darkness of Richard Bavin’s Thirteenth Station, Jesus Dies on the Cross. For Bavin, too, rereading the text was a revelation – he had never previously thought about the eclipse. To get around the problem of an allblack painting, he hit on the dramatic solution of making the temple curtain a backdrop to the Crucifixion. It’s the sliver of golden light shining through a tear in the curtain that makes Christ’s body dimly visible to us, while offering a glimpse of the glory ahead. Standing before the curtain with his arms raised, Christ seems to be delivering a prologue to the real action. “I didn’t think consciously about the idea that when the curtain was open there’d be a whole new world,” says Bavin.

Light at the end of the tunnel is also the message of exhibition’s most dynamic and unsettling image. Julienne Braham’s Eleventh Station, Jesus Promises His Kingdom to the Good Thief, places us cheek by jowl with the Penitent Thief as a bruised and bloodied Jesus twists around with wide open arms to confront him – and us – with the enormity of his promise, “Today you will be with me in Paradise”. Behind him, the wood of the Cross puts out green shoots and white doves fly across the breaking light of an egg-yellow sun. The effect is cathartic.

In 2007, the artist’s 25-year-old daughter was brutally murdered by a schizophrenic neighbour. Braham had previously avoided meditating on the Crucifixion, but having to paint it, “I came to see the message of the Resurrection through and throughout the pain on the Cross … Up to now I have seen the Crucifixion and Resurrection as two separate events. But now I can meditate on the death of Christ … with a new perspective and new hope, with the mind firmly fixed on the promise of Heaven, rather like walking through a dark corridor with eyes fixed on the well-lit room ahead.”

The catalogue opens with a warning from Matisse: “The Stations of the Cross are not a procession. This work is the deepest drama of mankind. Faced with this drama, the artist cannot remain a spectator. He is obliged to take part in it.” For all the artists, this has been a voyage of emotional discovery. The fact that everyone was happy with their lot, thinks Nicola Hopwood, testifies to the sustained imaginative power of the Stations’ narrative. “When mine came out of the hat I thought, ‘Wow! That’s a wonderful one’. But then I realised they were all wonderful.”

■ To view more of the Stations and find out about related events visit www.thetablet.co.uk/texts

CATHERINE PEPINSTER

‘Some disabled people have reported facing hostility and even violence’

When George Osborne announced changes in his Budget to child benefit, limiting the entitlement of wealthier parents, all the discussions surrounding his reforms were focused on fairness. It was fairer to means-test this allowance, said commentators. The rich don’t need the full amount, they said. It’s far better to help poorer families.

This was a different argument from the one that used to dominate debate about child benefit and its forerunner, family allowance: that it should be a universal benefit so that people wouldn’t feel stigmatised by being means-tested in order to claim it.

In the early years of Britain’s welfare state, the main focus of policymakers’ attention was the problem of people declining to claim help because it was considered shameful. Now the focus is on rights and fairness. Stigma seems to have fallen away from public discourse about benefits. If that’s the case, then society may well have made some progress.

But then, two days after the Budget and all the talk of fairness, came the realisation that stigma is still lurking in society, hunting down new targets. It was President Nicolas Sarkozy who was alert to its dangers. Following the killing of the Toulouse gunman Mohammed Merah, wanted for a spate of murders, including those of three Jewish children, President Sarkozy stepped in to urge the French that there should be no stigmatising of Muslims because of Merah’s crimes.

This week, stigma popped up again. In his major speech on dementia, David Cameron spoke of the national crisis of the disease that “steals into the heart of families”. Just as efforts had been made to fight the stigma of HIV in the 1980s and 1990s, he said, so people have to fight that of dementia.

The word stigma comes from the Greek, when a mark or tattoo was cut into the skin of criminals or slaves, marking them out as separate from the rest. It enabled society to identify them easily as different and worthless. Stigmatising can shade easily into scapegoating. That, too, owes its origins to the Greeks, who would cast out a criminal or a beggar from the community as responsible for a natural disaster. The Jews of the Old Testament turned to ritual, with a goat cast out into the desert as atonement for failings.

Last week at the latest event in the Westminster Faith Debate series, this one held to discuss religion and welfare, I heard of another group being stigmatised and scapegoated. Some disabled people have reported facing hostility and even violence for claiming benefits, and being accused of pretending to be less able-bodied than they really are.

It was clear that people linked this negative attitude to the current economic downturn. So while there is a national conversation about fairness, and the view that benefits don’t need to be universal, there is also a rival attitude of suspicion and mean-spiritedness towards others. It suggests a decline in solidarity – that the post-war consensus is disappearing and in its place is a resentment that people who are hard-working are burdened with sustaining those who are feckless.

Archbishop Peter Smith of Southwark told the Westminster gathering that this kind of hostility offers a particular challenge to people of faith: that they have to help combat misconceptions. The difficulty is, as he pointed out, that so many church organisations which are in a position to confront prejudice and work with vulnerable people are now facing serious cuts to their government grants.

Faith organisations are well placed to do exactly what David Cameron wants – to fight the stigma of a disease that many think shaming. But if they have their grants cut, it will be a hard task to counter the fear, ignorance and suspicion surrounding dementia.

The very organisations that the Coalition Government once suggested were key to creating the Big Society are now unable to do so. Indeed, it’s noticeable that the Big Society seems to have slipped out of the government lexicon.

Sociologists describe stigmatised people as being devalued, despised, rejected and scorned. They uncannily echo the words of Isaiah, used in the Good Friday liturgy and thought to foretell Christ: “He was despised and rejected among men.”

Humanity has an extraordinary capacity for victimisation and self-righteousness, for turning the spotlight on those who are different. Just when it seems possible that we’re capable of progress, in the twentyfirst century, people of a different faith, the sick and the disabled are turned into social pariahs.

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