Dead to Sin and Alive to God

Physical Geology (cave cast/slow time), by Ilana Halperin

Romans 6

Commentaries by Laura Popoviciu

Works of art by Edmund de Waal, Güler Ates and Ilana Halperin

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‘Like Natural Sculpture in Cathedral Cavern’

Commentary by Laura Popoviciu

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In a cave inside a dormant volcanic mountain in Auvergne, France, time moves to its own rhythm: unaware, undisturbed, slow. The only speed is in the movement of the spring water which accelerates through this cavernous space. Through an artist’s intervention, this water has the power to create limestone sculptures in the same way that stalactites form, only at high velocity. Cascading over giant casting ladders and filling plaque-like rubber moulds, the insides of which turn to stone, this process takes up to a year.

Is this long? Ilana Halperin is patient. She knows that stalactites form extremely slowly—usually less than ten centimetres every thousand years—so she embraces this slow time made (relatively) fast.

While her mould is immersed in water, the water’s accelerated time dilates, allowing for pauses and sedimentation. As the water travels through the channels she has prescribed, it washes the inside of the mould and starts to inhabit its chambers in layers of limestone.

‘To wait beside an extinct volcano is to wait by a grave’, Halperin notes (McAra 2022: 33). However, this place of burial makes space for renewal. The cave cast undergoes a transformative process (ibid: 73). It is washed, flipped over; it grows in and from water. Touched by water, it precipitates like ‘a mineralogy of the spirit’ (ibid: 19). Or a baptism.

In his commentary on Romans 6, Cyril of Jerusalem (c.313–86) observed that ‘when you go down into the water and are entombed in the water as [Christ] was in the rock, you may rise again’ (Bray 2005: 155). For Paul, baptism is simultaneously a likeness of death and a likeness of resurrection (Romans 6:4)

When this cast was extracted from the water after nine months (to coincide with Halperin’s 36th birthday), and then cracked open, it showed two sides: a rough and translucent verso, and a smooth, flesh-like recto. While the verso resembles a stalactite to recall its time in the cave, the recto displays, in delicate encrustation, two motifs created by the artist. One replicates the process of mineralisation and the other, evoking the imprint of a life form in a trace fossil, shows air bubbles.

‘Like natural sculpture in cathedral cavern’ (Keats 1922: 272), the cave cast participates in a liturgy of initiation. As though in a font of regeneration, these air bubbles suggest the beginnings of new life, breathed into the rock.

References

Bray, Gerald (ed.). 2005. ‘Romans’, in Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture. New Testament, vol. 6 (Illinois: InterVarsity Press), pp. 151–75

Barnes, Sara and Andrew Patrizio (eds). 2010. Ilana Halperin: Physical Geology. A Field Guide to Body Mineralogy and Other New Landmass (Berlin: Berliner Medizinhistorisches Museum der Charité)

Conversation with Ilana Halperin, February 2024

Heinzelmann, Markus (ed). 2022. The Power of Wonder: New Materialisms in Contemporary Art (Bochum: Museum unter Tage)

Keats, John. 1922. Selected Poems (London: Collins)

McAra, Catriona (ed). 2022. Ilana Halperin: Felt Events (London: Strange Attractor Press)

‘Across the Porcelain of Evening’

Commentary by Laura Popoviciu

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‘A title is a sort of letter of promise in a pocket’, writes Edmund de Waal (2014: 214). Entitled door into the dark, this work anticipates an encounter with something promised. And it unfolds gently like a five-page letter.

Contained within wall-mounted vitrines, black porcelain vessels dance around ebony coloured marble and golden tablets. Within this display lie pauses, rhythms, longings, repetitions, silences, breaths, hesitations. Should we continue? How can we go on? Do you not know that…? What then?

Such rhetorical questions also form the basis of chapter 6 of Paul’s letter to the Romans where the apostle guides his hearers on a journey from death to resurrection with Christ—just as de Waal’s porcelain (as dark as a midsummer night’s sky) yields to the inspiriting disclosure of gold.

How do we make the transition from sin to grace?

For de Waal, letting objects be in the shadows is essential. By observing how shadows move around objects and have the power to transform them, darkness itself is redemptively active.

Once filled, each shadowy vitrine becomes a space for contemplation. And as our eyes move around the work, we ourselves, in viewing it, become a little like the raw material from which its vessels are made: first formless; then taking on a multitude of shapes before the potter at the wheel. Gently kneaded clay, lightly touched by the artist’s hands, washed by water like a baptism. For this mysterious process of transformation to reach completion, the shaped clay must be placed into the kiln, while the artist begins a vigil of waiting.

Made in 2022, door into the dark was part of an exhibition at Waddesdon Manor, UK, whose title was inspired by a line from ‘The Eighth Duino Elegy’ by Rainer Maria Rilke: we live here, forever taking leave (Mitchell 1989: 197). Perhaps there is hope in this transient presence: a ‘letter of promise’ in the pockets of our hearts. The discreetly placed golden tablets lend an aura to the vessels which could be an intimation of glory.

‘The bat quivers across the porcelain of evening’, Rilke concludes (ibid: 195). In doing so, it stirs the very air which the golden morning light will eventually pierce. It is into this state of complete stillness and darkness, like a vigil during the Easter liturgy, that Paul’s letter also speaks, reminding us that Christ’s death is a promise of resurrection.

References

Conversation with Edmund de Waal, February 2024

De Waal, Edmund. 2014. Edmund de Waal (London: Phaidon)

______. 2019. psalm (Venice: Jewish Museum and Ateneo Veneto)

______. 2022. we life here forever taking leave, exhibition leaflet (Waddesdon: Waddesdon Manor)

Mitchell, Stephen (ed). 1989. The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (New York: Vintage International Edition)

Walking in Newness of Life

Commentary by Laura Popoviciu

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She walks. Not according to the flesh, but according to the spirit (Romans 8:4). By faith, not by sight (2 Corinthians 5:7). She walks in love (Ephesians 5:2), guided by the spirit.

In Güler Ates’s White Shadow, a floating apparition cuts across the darkness: ethereal, mysterious, elusive. The delicate white tulle, which gracefully accompanies her, barely outlines her silhouette. Like incense, it only allows a quick glimpse of the turquoise silk garment that veils her body. She is in transit in this interplay between revealing and concealing. Inside her tightly wrapped fabric she makes subtle moves to dispel the darkness, while the artist waits with her camera for a flicker of natural light. Until then, the performer has time to reflect and ask questions such as: ‘who occupied these shadows before me?’.

Inside the grand rooms at Great Fosters, Egham, UK, where this photograph was taken, the traces of the past are absorbed into the heavy folds of the crimson patterned drapery, the damask covered walls, the intricately carved Quattrocento doors, and the thick Tudor brickwork. Here, the heavy steps of Henry VIII mingle with the subtle ones of Elizabeth I.

In her discreet yet haunting presence, Ates’s mysterious figure stands for those who once inhabited this space and also those to come—layers upon layers, garments over garments; all under one roof, taking refuge inside her veil. Ates often sees the fabric which her collaborator wears as a sanctuary or a tent, an anchor in the face of displacement, drawn from Ates’s own experience as a UK-based artist from the displaced Zaza Alevi community in Eastern Turkey.

The apostle Paul spent much of his time walking: from Antioch to Cyprus and Damascus, and from Jerusalem to Rome. Between East and West. Making tents and writing letters to the Gentiles. His apostleship encouraged a pathway from darkness to light, where darkness is overcome through baptism, ‘a death to sin’ which leads to a resurrection in and with Christ.

Ates’s figure gives a performance that uses light in the service of light. As heavy as her body may be, carrying the weight of a lifetime, the tulle is diaphanous, uplifting, bathed in light.

Wherever she may go, she is not alone. She has the White Shadow by her side to guide her as she ‘walks in newness of life’ (Romans 6:4).

References

Conversation with Güler Ates, February 2024

Marcelle Joseph Projects. 2011. ‘Güler Ates: Present and Absent, 2011, press release’ (Egham: Marcelle Joseph Projects)

O’Halloran, David. 2013. Burqas, Veils, and Hoodies: Identity and Representation (Melbourne: Walker Street Gallery and Arts Centre), pp. 9–10

Rosen, Aaron. 2019. ‘Güler Ates. Absorbing Histories’, in Brushes with Faith. Reflections and Conversations on Contemporary Art (Eugene: Cascade Books), pp. 119–29

From Funeral Ode to Springtime Lyric

Comparative commentary by Laura Popoviciu

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Lustrous glazes clothe a multitude of clay bodies. Calcifying springs coat a rubber mould with layers of limestone. A weightless tulle delicately drapes a turquoise silhouette. Similarly, baptism is a form of clothing. Traditionally using the colours of white and gold, it covers the old self, to disclose a new purity of life and to announce the glory of resurrection.

Baptism holds a central place in Paul’s theology and is addressed in chapter 6 of his letter to the Romans. According to the book of Acts, its significance stems from his encounter with the risen Christ on the road to Damascus: he ‘rose and was baptised’ (Acts 9:18).

According to Thomas Aquinas’s interpretation of Paul’s thinking, baptism is an outward sacrament with an inward effect: everlasting, transformative, visceral (Levering 2014: 78). This profound change happens on the inside, like porcelain vessels being fired in the kiln, or a sculpture being modelled in a cave, or a photograph being formed inside the camera.

What is visible in baptism is the outward movement, the performative aspect of the ritual before the baptismal font: the prayer over the water, the pouring of water, the bending over and the rising up.

Similarly, we can view the creative process of the three artworks in this exhibition as an interplay between what is visible and what isn’t. We can imagine the potter’s daily ritual as a ceremony where he lines up all the instruments before the wheel: the balls of porcelain clay, a bucket of water, a sponge, and a knife. He then starts to make an outside and an inside, ready to be fired.

We can envisage Ilana Halperin’s wonder before the ‘oddities drawer’ of the geology department at the Manchester Museum where she first came across an historic cave cast. We can trace how she then devised an iconography for her own cast: a preparatory drawing turned into an etching, then into 3D model, imprinted onto a matrix ready to be immersed into the fast waters of the cave.

We can step inside the room at Great Fosters in Surrey—together with Güler Ates and her camera—to observe the heavy curtain and the folds of the colourful fabrics which she will use to enwrap her mysterious figure.

What we don’t see is the waiting—the ‘in between’; the before and after.

For Paul, baptism takes its power from Christ’s Passion. It is ‘an eschatology in the flesh’ (Levering 2014: 76). The state of vigil happens in darkness. The same darkness that imbues Edmund de Waal’s black glazes still clicking from the kiln. The same darkness that permeates the cave where the splashes of the water shape the contours of Halperin’s sculpture. The same darkness that fills Ates’s photographed interior with its resemblance to a Dutch Old Master painting—like those in the National Gallery, London from which she often derives inspiration.

Baptism mediates between death and resurrection, between darkness and light. Its traditional solemn celebration on the eve of Easter signifies the death of a Christian’s old, sinful self (Romans 6:6) and the embrace of new life.

Each artwork in this exhibition guides us gently through something akin to this: an almost imperceptible transition between shadows and light. In the case of de Waal’s creation, everything that is illuminated by the golden tablets of porcelain hidden behind the black glazes acquires an unexpected new radiance. Or, as the artist observes, ‘the ode on mourning becomes a lyric on spring’ (De Waal 2014: 51). In Halperin’s vision, the cave changes from a place of burial into a place of rebirth as her cast is brought to the surface and opened to the light. The mysterious woman in Ates’s photograph emerges from darkness to light ‘in a flash, in a twinkling of an eye’ (1 Corinthians 15:52). In all three artworks, there is a transformation: from the fragility of porcelain and the softness of the limestone or the imponderability of the fabric to the indestructibility of the spirit. They are all shaped by earth, water, fire, air, and spirit into letters about death and life, written ‘not in stone but on tablets of human hearts’ (2 Corinthians 3:3).

The essence of Paul’s letter to the Romans lies in one phrase: ‘dead to sin and alive to God’ (Romans 6:11). All three artworks capture this message: from the shadowy forms and figurations of our present reality there emerges the shape of what shall be: the outline of a more illumined existence.

References

De Waal, Edmund. 2014. White Road (London: Chatto & Windus)

Greenman, Jeffrey P. and Timothy Larsen (eds). 2005. Reading Romans through the Centuries: From the Early Church to Karl Barth (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press)

Kaye, Bruce Norman. 1979. The Argument of Romans: with special reference to chapter 6 (Austin: Schola Press)

Levering, Matthew. 2014. Paul in the Summa Theologiae (Washington D. C.: Catholic University of America Press)

Scheck, Thomas. 2008. Origen and the History of Justification: The Legacy of Origen’s Commentary on Romans (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press)

Next exhibition: Romans 8:18–39