Bartlemas Chapel
Goethean Observation
I'm making this initial visit to the chapel a few days before archaeological excavations are due to begin within its grounds. I'm interested in how my initial observations might be tied in with both the archaeology discovered there and the chapel's history. How far is empathy an augmented discourse between bodily experience and knowledge?
As usual, I began by observing the chapel using a Goethean methodology, which - as if often the case - ended up following its own course.
Pre-Observation
Leaving Cowley Road and walking up the track to the chapel was like leaving the modern world behind; not completely for the outside around the chapel and here inside once can still hear the traffic humming like an overhead cable carrying electricity.
The first thing I notice when entering the chapel is the smell; the smell of age, of the past - the smell of the rooms in the church I'd attended as a child. Old books, paper and damp.
The light is slowly beginning to fade being as it is 6pm and the weather grey and raining.
I shall endeavour to carry out the observation without electric light for as long as is possible.
Part 1
The chapel is small comprising two parts divided by a screen. The main door on the chapel's western side is locked and one enters through a small door on the left hand (north) side. (I'm going to carry out my observation inside rather than out - not least because of the rain, but also because I can easily record outside at a later date).
The walls are all whitewashed; they are rough and bumpy beneath revealing the stone. There are five windows, each of which is arched and through which the last light of the day is creeping. Behind me to my left is a large door in front of which are stacked wooden chairs - no doubt for congregations when services are held here, which they still are. Along the left hand wall more chairs are lined up in a row - eight of them. At the end facing me and in front of the screen are two small pews. Running alongside the right hand wall is another row of chairs - nine of them. There is a radiator, an old wooden cupboard on the side of which are electric sockets and a light switch. I'm sitting on a small wooden bench. In the corner to my right is a large red candle holder replete with candle - no doubt for ceremonial purposes.
Ahead, either side of the doorway through the screen are two small stools. Beyond the screen, from my position, I can see a wooden altar with a crucifix and four candles. A stool stands before them on which rests a box. Above the altar is a window and on the left and right hand walls are also windows. In the wall in this half of the building, on the right hand side from where I am sitting is another window upon the sill of which - which is deep - sits a book, open on a small lectern. Another lectern stands next to me on my right with a book containing the names of visitors. I write my name in it now.
I get up and walk. The hum of the traffic is weak like the light. I can hear the wind rustling the trees outside. Outside the window above the book is an apple tree covered with fruit. My footsteps echo.
I measure the first part of the chapel which is approximately 8 paces. The floor in this part of the chapel is parquet. In the part ahead of me it's stone.
The pew creaks as I sit down. There are two small pews divided in two to accommodate two people. There are candle stands with low candles (burned down) on my left, a crucifix on a pole and a blue bottle of gas. On the right hand side is another blue bottle, two more well-used candles, four chairs and a picture of Christ. I see now that the altar is stone. Either side in the corners are two wood burners. The window in the left wall is narrower than the others and has a deep sill. This part of the chapel again measures approximately 8 paces.
On a window sill (right) is the curled body of a dead fly. Outside I see the apple trees and the leaves on the wet grass.
The altar is covered by a cloth - green and another white one beneath.
The bible on what I now see is a folding lectern is open at John. Tomorrow's reading, John 3:13-17.
The ceiling is wooden with numerous coloured shields placed between the beams. The light is fading and it's getting harder to see.
As I stand before the altar my face is drawn up to the window above it and to the sky. I turn to my left and see the old building that stands alongside. The wind stirs again. There is a white iron work chair in the garden outside. No-one is sitting in it of course.
The window above the large door in the western end of the chapel is smaller than all the others. Again I find my eyes drawn up towards it, to the pale grey light of the sky. There is a large hole in the wall on the right hand side (as I look at it) no doubt where a wooden bolt was once used to secure the church.
There are two circles, unwhitewashed either side of the door.
There are four 'arches' supporting the ceiling. The wood appears to be very old. The stone of the floor around the altar is patterned almost as if something has spilled upon it and not quite dried.
The width of the chapel is 7 paces.
I look again at the book full of names and dates - someone from as far away as Australia has visited here. In just a few pages we're back at the start of 2005. I think of what I've done in these few pages - I think of the people I know who have recently passed away.
As the light fades the windows become a stronger presence as they hold what remains of the light outside. I can hear the chimes of an ice-cream van - a sound from my childhood. But although the windows are dominant, I don't find myself looking beyond - just at them.
Echoes and footsteps. Car horns.
Part 2
I allow the cars and the sounds of the modern world to fall away and instead I listen only to the wind blowing through the trees. I look outside at the trees. I imagine the fruit trees across hundreds of seasons, bearing fruit, dropping the fruit, surviving the winter, blooming again in the spring. I imagine how much more important apple trees would have been long ago; a vital source of food rather than something one might idly pick while strolling past. The book on the sill is open at a text on St. Bartholomew. The words are silent on the page.
I read the first few words on the saint. I turn the page - again the ice-cream van. The page creaks like the pew I sat on. I can hear the words as I read them in my head, although of course they make no sound. I imagine hundreds and thousands of internal voices of people who have stood inside the chapel.
The shadow cast by my hand is more prominent here before the window.
I pick a spot on the left hand side of the chapel looking towards the altar. I imagine all those who have stood here in my place over the centuries, looking to their right at whatever was outside; up ahead through the window; at the others standing there with them; and I begin to imagine those other people. I begin to try and imagine their presence.
The crows outside help dispel the modern world. I think of the floor - how it would have been. I imagine the city behind me, Oxford as it was a few hundred years ago.
I move around the chapel before the screen and glance behind me to the side and up ahead and where I see the walls and windows I imagine people. Each glance is accompanied with a thought - my thoughts.
I try and get a sense of my body in relation to the chapel.
The shadows grow across the floor, blurring to become the first signs of nightfall. Forms in the chapel, like the legs of the chairs against the walls begin to disappear. Everything becomes a shadow - perhaps even me.
I imagine the large locked door being opened and people filing into the light behind. I picture that light filling the chapel, chasing away the shadows.
I'm aware of my body - how my back is aching - how I'm hungry.
The green of the leaves outside is still very visible. Everything is brown, green and grey.
My shadow is faint on the wall.
I move to stand before the altar. I turn and face the large door. Lines of sight from people long since gone still linger. I turn and face the altar. My eyes are drawn to the window, following these eye lines behind me.
I imagine the candles flickering, casting shadows on the walls as the light continues to fade. These candles which are little more than stubs of wax with short blackened wicks and puddles of wax around them.
The sound of the traffic cannot be stopped. It's always present like interference. The only way to hear the past is with my body.
Part 3
(Rather hard as I can hardly see to write.)
Fleeting, embodied shadows.
I try and think of myself as the chapel. There is, like everything, an outside (exterior) and an inside (interior). I can feel my body - my presence - not so much as me but as something within the chapel.
Contact with the floor, with the furniture means that the chapel and I are one.
NB I have to put on the light - and only then am I aware how dark it is outside. The shift from an external light and interior dark to interior light and external dark is striking. When I turn off the light it's reversed.
I'm aware of my heart as I sit with my eyes closed - of my breathing. My back against the wall - my breathing and heartbeat becomes that of the chapel.
Exterior / interior.
Beyond the chapel and inside.
Beyond my own body and inside.
A reversal of the two.
Interior voice reading / exterior voice listening.
With the lights on, the light beyond the window is blueish above the door. Up ahead, the window above the altar is dark.
Again there is almost a grain in the building - of sight. Looking towards the altar one is aware of the individual; then turning round, of a crowd.
Absent Presence
The following text is taken from my blog.
At a recent meeting with the East Oxford Archaeology Project we were given a short talk about an upcoming dig at Bartlemas Chapel. A number of things interested me in light of the work I've already done there, one of which was the image of a resistance survey carried out in the grounds of the chapel. At once, a sort of chain reaction of images flicked through my mind, which I've tried to recreate below.
The first image is a Resistance Survey image from Iffley village. The dark patches indicate areas of low resistance while the lighter patches indicate areas of high resistance - such as the remains of buildings, roads, walls etc. I like the fact that images such as these can reveal a footprint of the past, not only in terms of where structures such as these once stood, but where people once walked, following specific paths. What might today be just a large field where one can walk in any direction is revealed through techniques such as these as being a place where people walked along certain lines. The ground is revealed as a palimpsest of movement, where, just as fragments of pottery etc might be found, fragments of movement can also be revealed.
Looking at a Resistance survey image (such as that above) during the meeting, I was reminded of an image from a previous work of mine which I exhibited last year. The image was part of an overall picture of the Belzec Death Camp in Poland, photographed from a plane in 1944. It was a place where in 1942, over half a million people were murdered, but walking there now, one cannot image that many people. Walking around the memorial, following a prescribed path, you find yourself looking in at the space enclosed, contemplating the half a million lines of movement that ended there. Where did these lines stretch back to? Where had they come from?
Thinking this way is one small way to establish empathy with those who died in places such as Belzec and the image below, when coupled with the image above resonates with this idea.
The next image is a detail from a photograph taken of someone in 1903. This person has of course long since disappeared from the world and yet they remain. They aren't of course visible in the places where they lived and worked (for example on Headington Hill where this image was taken) but through light (just as with electricity in the Reistance survey) their trace is revealed. The aesthetic link with the images above strengthens this connection.
During my observation at Bartlemas Chapel last week, I wrote the following:
"The book on the sill is open at a text on St. Bartholomew. The words are silent on the page. I read the first few words on the saint. I turn the page - again the ice-cream van. The page creaks like the pew I sat on. I can hear the words as I read them in my head, although of course they make no sound. I imagine hundreds and thousands of internal voices of people who have stood inside the chapel."
Looking at the bible in the chapel, I saw the words as being like the fragmenetary image of past movement revealed through a Resistance survey, or the image of someone frozen in a photograph. These are words that in this small space have been heard over the course of hundreds of years; words that have mingled with the thoughts of those listening. Reading the bible within that space, I could hear the words in my mind - just as I could hear my thoughts - and yet everything was silent. (Silence here equates with (apparent) emptiness - the field where once there were buildings and people. Words read silently mirrors the electric current passing into the ground, revealing a pattern of movement beneath - lost movement, lost thoughts).
I tried to imagine the thoughts of those who've listened over countless generations. If they could be written down what would they tell us? After the meeting, I thought about the aesthetic of the Resistance survey and the photographs above, then pictured fragments of words in much the same way - just like the image below.
Leaf and Shard
The following text is taken from my blog.
Out of a small pile of earth, greyish-brown in colour, a piece of brightly glazed pottery appeared as I scraped with my trowel. Although only a few centimetres across it was nonetheless striking given the colours of its glaze; an orangey-yellow and warm reddish-brown, as vivid perhaps as when it was a whole piece of pottery in use however many centuries ago.
Colour, in this example, becomes for me a vehicle for a more empathetic engagement with the past (a theme central to my work). The colour of the sky, the apples on the trees, the trees themselves and the grass were one with the colours of this small fragment of pottery, which until that moment had remained hidden for (perhaps) hundreds of years. It was as if, rather than a shard of pottery, a piece of colour (or colours) from a day hundreds of years ago had lain buried in the soil; colours which at once melted back into the world from which they'd been estranged so long .
Pulling this shard from the almost monochromatic soil, was like looking at an old black and white photograph, where one imagines colour then movement. And looking up at the chapel, at the world moving all around me, I could, in that split second, glimpse the mediaeval past, acknowledging that that distant time was (although very different) just like the world today; there were colours and movement, experienced by individuals just like me and whoever had used whatever the fragment had once been a part of.
A little later as I continued to dig, I found a leaf inside my trench which had blown in from the side. The colours were very similar to that of the pottery (although they have darkened since). And once again this link between the past and present came to the fore. I was thrown back to a mediaeval autumn and imagined autumn in that very spot centuries ago. Like a chain reaction, I imagined the buildings, the road nearby, the walk into town. What was Oxford like at the time as the world moved towards the winter?
This single leaf (pictured above) is pregnant with the passage of time, the unrelenting march of time through another year, towards its end. The colours are like a sunset; the end of a year, the end of a day. But after night comes morning and after winter, the promise of spring. This idea of a continuous cycle seems embodied in both the leaf and the shard. One is young, the other very old - they turn or move in different 'orbits' - but nonetheless, in their colours, they have something in common; something I have in common with the individual who owned the pottery (from which the fragment comes) centuries ago; that is, we are part of the same world.
Old Sky
The following text is taken from my blog.
In response to my last blog entry, I remembered a painting by Howard Hodgkin which seemed to echo what I had written. It's called 'Old Sky' and it's a painting which, for me, is about the idea of that continuous cycle of time; of many cycles (single days) embedded in the cycle of years (which in terms of the pottery shard becomes a cycle of centuries).
The painting is an image of the end of a day and the remembered image of hundreds of days lost to memory and beyond. It's about the act of remembering and the way the paint is applied to the frame becomes an attempt to reach beyond the limits of memory, to live again in the world when the memory was first formed. It's almost frantic; an attempt not to forget what will certainly be forgotten. The frame remains intact, an acknowledgement perhaps that to relive a time that's passed is impossible; that all that remains, inevitably, is a fragment of what has been.
As I alluded to in my blog, the relationship between colour and movement interests me a great deal and with this painting we have both colour and movement; movement when the painting was made and the movement of the act of remembering itself. For me, this reflects the idea of the cycle of a day and its relationship to the cycle of centuries; the relationship between the leaf and the pottery shard found during the dig. When I look at the pottery shard (below) I try to picture the world from which it has come. It's as if the edges of the shard are like the edges of the painting, and while we can't return to the world from which the shard has come, we can with the aid of the present attempt to imagine it.
I wrote in my last blog entry how when I dug the shard out of the ground, the colours at once melted back into the world from which they'd been estranged. This idea serves to illustrate that of moving beyond the frame or the edges of the shard in an attempt to re-imagine the past; how the act of remembering is as much to do with the body as the imagination - how it's a fusion of the two; a product of an embodied imagination; one which moves in the world just like those with whom we seek to empathise.