ANNUNCIATION 2014

I have exhibited Annunciation twice. Once as part of an exhibition - Beyond Belief - in 2004 in St Mary’s Church Guildford and a second time in 2014 in St Giles Church, Cripplegate in the City of London. For the St Giles exhibition I adapted the piece to make it freestanding (which it was not in St Mary’s).

The thinking behind Annunciation 2014 : I revisited the symbolism of the New Testament story of the Angel Gabriel’s appearance to the Virgin Mary.  Renaissance paintings have given us a familiar picture of the seated Virgin listening to the kneeling angel who holds a lily as a symbol of purity. 

I am focusing not on the Virgin, the angel or the lily – the physical - but on the ‘metaphysical’.  The dead wood of the chair (and of the cross too) had symbolic meaning for the early Christians because it was a material of the physical world not of another, heavenly order.  The pollen of the lily will outlive its flower and the palaeobotanists can excavate it long afterwards – it is a symbol of new life in this physical world. 

In my work, I have tried to deconstruct the Renaissance picture, the Virgin, the angel and the lily have gone, we are looking at an empty chair with lily pollen on it, sandblasted into  glass to catch the idea that we are ‘looking through’ time at what was left when that encounter ended.  Was the original symbolism of the Annunciation giving a message of a new beginning to those who had worshipped one God in the Hebrew tradition? Do the New Testament story and the master works of the Renaissance capture a ‘regeneration myth’ shared with other cultures?  Should we understand that there is an Annunciation for our time and indeed for every time, which speaks of new understanding of our religious and philosophical traditions?   The wooden chair and the pollen in the glass are asking us these questions.

I was able to make the work with the help of an Arts Council Development Grant.

I should like to thank DDr Heidemarie Halbritter of the Botanical Institute of the University of Vienna for allowing me to use her images