I’m thinking about the phrase ‘making an entrance’ – I think my artwork here in Trinity College’s reception is introducing itself quite quietly, but hopefully so as to point out the process and the means, rather than as a showy full-stop.
Trinity itself is, after all, about the process and the means. The showy full-stop is God, and I don’t think anyone here has the visual, doctrinal or textual monopoly on describing who He is. I do, however, want to raise the curtain on what happens to people here, to their perceptions and to the reframing nature of faith.
These pieces were made in 2011, and were included in a Bristol exhibition called ‘Walking Through the Veil’. They are about transition – visually, from negative image to positive image, from forest as flattened pattern to 3D space. But also mystically, from self-involved relating to the world to spacious inter-relating. It’s the resonance of a entrance-way, which in a church’s structure is called the narthex, where you turn round to find yourself in a different type of space. A space that reframes you, rather more than you do it.
Header image: Narthex triptych, 2011 (installation at Trinity College), by Sheona Beaumont.
