Cubic Angels
Timber, card, cellophane, foil and light
The piece is intended to capture the mourning of the world during the time of Christ’s crucifixion as told by Colin McChaon in his painting The Five Wounds of Christ No. 2 (1977-78). To start the process, I began researching the piece and the body of work that McChaon had produced to begin to appreciate the artist’s background and to help develop an understanding of my selected piece. The piece was then distilled into a simple analysis: the work attempts to embody the suffering of Christ in order to create a moment of reflection in the audience. This then became my goal to recreate in my own piece. I began this project with an intention to play with light and made an early connection with McChaon’s work with how he uses the light of the divine to emphasise his work. I felt that a tension was needed however to bring to light the gravitas of the event of the crucifixion; a way to translate the man and the divine. This came in the form of translating light to its more earthly interpretation and consider it as a technical device derived from our own understanding of the physical universe. The created the obstacle however light is all surround and made me dawdle on the question, “Do I use direct light, or, do I use the light that surrounds and reflects?” I knew light is inherent to space and considered that piece should incorporate both these properties of light.
My piece achieves the goal of reflection by first stemming from my own self-reflection on my own faith; an missing link stemming from my understanding of the physical universe we inhabit. Religious debate aside, I knew that these would ultimately be the best elements to challenge myself on, a balance between the celestial and the mortal, a connection between faith and science. The piece then begins by being set during the same hours of The Five Wounds of Christ No. 2 when the Christian bible states that darkness engulfed the world. A geometric angel (a common trope in the work of McChaon) remains to cast light on Christs suffering at the cross however it is divided. A curved barrier is set up between the celestial, a take on the double-slit experiment which gave birth to one of Physics greatest understandings, the wave-particle duality of light. This is the perversion on faith, the light is no longer pure and becomes mortal. This is then left to finally reach Christ, the mediator between the divine and the mortal world that has withered away as the impure light reflects and refracts of the body of the object. My piece is not just an attempt to capture the gravitas of the crucifixion, but in essence my own crucifixion of the faith I was brought up to believe in. The loss of which I intended to reflect and meditate on, just as McChaon intended with his.