My latest article for Artlyst is an interview with Mark Dean, whose Stations of the Cross we recently hosted at St Stephen Walbrook as an all-night Vigil on Easter Eve.
In the interview Mark speaks about the elements of his work which often come together in quite surprising ways. He says:
"It does sometimes feel like it’s not just up to me – that there is an underlying relationship that I am drawing out, or noticing. And so the collaborative basis of this project feels like an extension of that process. And this is confirmed by the fact that all three of us (and of course the churches we are partnering with) have a common relation in our Christian faith, despite our quite different approaches. So without making grand claims, I would say it is the Holy Spirit that binds it all together. Actually, this goes back to the previous question about the sense of the sacred in art. The late critic Stuart Morgan once said to me that the problem with the Modernist engagement with spirituality wasn’t that it wasn’t real, but that it was somehow exclusive – as though only artists were privy to the spirituality that generated creativity. Understanding the working of the Holy Spirit throughout the world helps us to avoid that kind of elitism, which can be understood as a form of Gnosticism."
This aspect of his work is further explored by Lucy Newman Cleeve in her essay for the Stations2017 catalogue and in an interview that she gave to Elephant Magazine about the project. Stations2017 has been reviewed by Art & Christianity Journal, while the videos shown can be viewed on Mark Dean's website.
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Neil Young - Cowgirl In The Sand.
