I am very pleased to be able to publish today an interview I have undertaken with
about aspects of his career and interests.
Rupert Loydell: Constructing the world
Creativity and spirituality in the polyphonic practices of a poet-painter.
Born in London, Rupert Loydell studied visual arts and creative writing for a creative arts degree at Crewe & Alsager College, Cheshire (now MMU) and took his MA in Creative Writing at Plymouth University. He continues to practice as a fine artist, as well as write. Much of his work engages with aspects of spirituality and belief.
He and I came to know each other through the Greenbelt Festival and found that we share many interests in art, literature, poetry, music and the exploration of beliefs. In this interview we explore some of that ground while also engaging with the breadth of his interests and practice.
JE: You have written clusters of poems about faith and doubt and often respond 'to other people’s notions of faith, belief or action'. What stimulates your interest in faith and how do you view your engagement with it?
RL: I grew up attending a Baptist Church in London. Both of my parents were deacons there, were involved in running the youth group when I was too young to attend, and my dad was a lay preacher. So I was brought up to believe in traditional nonconformist Christianity, although I later realised the way some things had been taught was fairly liberal.
I guess like all teenagers I rebelled, or thought I did, asking questions, rejecting some answers, etc. Over the following years I also discovered that I don't like evangelism, happy-clappy songs, and that I like mystery and ritual. I read a lot of
Thomas Merton and other writers who challenged me on social issues, community and ideas about mysticism, as well as what I can only refer to as postmodern theologians such as
Mark C Taylor, whose work overlaps with philosophy, cultural theory, and post-Wittgenstein ideas about language.
I guess I am not very trusting of experiential belief any more, and am appalled by the ideas that anyone thinks they have the right to impose their ideas, rituals or rules on anyone else. The institutional church mostly appals me, and I have also seen organisations such as the Greenbelt Festival, which I was involved in for many years as a writer, artist, curator and organiser, tie themselves in knots over the arts, liberal theology, social action, etc.
Most of my writing is me trying to sort through what is around me – news, other people, books and music – and make some kind of sense of it for myself. I don't expect answers, but hope to see connections between and ways of understanding what is going on. That would include ideas of faith and spirituality and how it affects and underpins individuals, organisations and even countries. At the moment that's pretty much my engagement with faith and doubt. Certainty is very worrying, it tends to lead to censorship, exclusion and injustice.
JE: You've just said that you're not very trusting of experiential belief any more but you continue to be inspired by and to explore aspects of faith and doubt, what is it about the nature of belief that keeps you engaged with it in terms of your art, poetry and other writings?
RL: Some of it, I'm sure, how I was brought up, some of it is a desire to understand and know what's going on... why the world is as it is, how we fit in to it. There's clearly some sort of need built into humans for religion, ritual and belief, a sense of order, and that includes me. I want to believe more than I find it possible to do. As I get older I become less and less certain of anything, and more and more sceptical of dogma and conviction.
JE: What do you think your exploration of belief in your art and writings might offer to those who are trusting of experiential belief?
RL: Well, anybody who thinks about things will find something to think about. Once we step away from content, narrative and storytelling, then we are into deep waters, have to start thinking about ideas such as the construction of meaning, how language and paint work, how we understand the world. Belief and faith and doubt are dependent upon these things as much as anything else.
I am not trying to encourage disbelief, but to understand belief. I find it hard to talk to people who are simply sure about everything in a simplistic manner, and wish to inflict that upon others. The world is more complex than that, and we all experience things differently – it's one of the strange things about being human, that we can never truly know anyone else in the way we inhabit ourselves.
JE: Is there any way in which you think God might be working through your art and writing?
RL: I struggle with that idea. Divine intervention doesn't seem to happen very much, so why should it happen with regard to my writing or painting?
It may be off the point a little, but I remember sitting in a boatshed in Norfolk, when I used to teach sailing there, and listening to a leader praying for dry weather the next day. Since we were in the middle of a drought, it seemed to me there were probably farmers elsewhere praying for rain for their crops...
For me any creation of the solar system, animals and humans, and weather and nature systems, is enough. Why would God then interfere with what he has created? There seems evidence of a flood, but it didn't cover the world, and what we have is a story about it, a narrative assembled after the event.
When we make art or poetry, or performances, music or whatever, they then have to stand alone with an audience. If we are didactic or make something that can only be comprehended in one way, then it will be boring. There is nothing worse than poetry which tries to persuade you about something, even when that is a good cause. Propaganda is propaganda, whatever its subject matter. I am more inclined to think of art and writing as simply being offered to a potential audience, am happy when I get responses from readers or a painting finds a home.
JE: Preloved Metaphors is a collection of poems exploring the process and effects of language and writing. You write because you’re 'interested in how we (society) and I (just me) deal with the changing world around us, which we understand through language'. As 'language is how we think and construct our world', how are you seeking to use it and what worlds are you creating?
RL: I guess I am trying to articulate my interior world? To make use of language's slippage, the multi-meanings words have, how syntax and form can be questioned and deconstructed. I think by drawing attention to something, that is how language works, I might challenge readers to think about what language is and how they use it; indeed how it is used around and indeed against us.
JE: One of your earlier books was called A Conference of Voices, an attempt to acknowledge not only your use of collage, but dialogues between yourself and source material (or their authors), and yourself and readers. Why is assemblage, collage, and dialogue an important element in your practice?
RL: I guess that book tried to foreground the idea of polyphony, as a way of dealing with what a series of previous poems had called 'Background Noise', that sieving of information I referred to earlier. Also the recognition of many points of view, the constant dialogue between humans and each other, the way language changes and evolves, and how different languages work in relation to each other. (Think, for example, of the languages used in medical practice, or games, or critical theory, in contrast to The Sun or computer magazines.)
In a 2021 edition of
Wire magazine, the musician
Vicki Bennett suggested that, '[c]ollage makes sense of things in a manner that our brain understands. Because of these fragmented parts and the way we assemble information, collage is like the working of the brain.' I totally agree. It is how films work, with visual cuts and jumps in time; how we read online; how we channel surf our TVs; how we experience the world. We only smooth it out later, making it into stories, focussed narratives, yet we don't have to. For well over a century now, art, fiction, poetry and music have understood that re-presentation, collage, remix and writing back to earlier work are useful creative techniques; in fact may be the only creative techniques we have ever had.
We select, contextualise, change, edit, and organise. Our shopping lists, manuscripts, sermons and experience. Any conclusion we come to is tentative and of the moment. I embrace that in my work. I should stress that there are many authors writing in a similar manner, mostly on the back of British linguistically innovative poetry and the American L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets. There is a lineage stretching from Modernist authors such as Eliot and Pound through the Beats, the Black Mountain, New York and Cambridge schools to the present. It also includes concrete, visual, digital and performance poetry.
JE: There is a breadth of engagement across your career in terms of themes, collaborators, dialogue partners, media and practice (from writing to teaching to publishing). As you look back across your career what stands out for you as significant from the breadth of your engagement?
RL: I think there are several things. One was the fact I did a degree in Creative Arts, that not only allowed me to study visual art and creative writing but also looked at how the arts interacted with each other, how they were different, how they could be integrated. This meant that although I cannot dance and cannot read music, I could understand and write about other art forms, and also be involved with dance, music and theatre through collaboration with and facilitating others.
I think all this led me to understand that creativity is the same process/reaction across the art forms. It relies on others, whether that is formal collaboration or as editor, producer or 'dialogue partner' (a nice term!) and also on finding ways to process the world around us, be those specific written forms, the language of paint and collage, or how music at is most reductive is – to paraphrase John Cage – 'an arrangement of sounds in space'.
I'm very interested in getting beyond self-expression and more into that understanding of materials, especially how pliable and plastic and fluid language is, especially because I genuinely think that language is how we think about and construct the world, the recognition of which would be the second significant thing to mention.
JE: You write a lot about music including the complex and neglected area of Jesus Rock in the UK. You viewed its birth as it emerged from coffee bars and churches inspired by visitors from America like Liberation Suite and Larry Norman. At the Greenbelt Festival you performed poetry and sold books on the fringe, and went to gigs by After the Fire and Writz. What is it about this period and the ways in which UK Jesus Rock diverged from the US multi-million-dollar Christian Contemporary Music (CCM) scene that continues to intrigue you?
RL: So part of it is trying to make sense of what was going on then, some of it is a kind of nostalgia, and there is also the fact that there is little academic research being done on it. One of my pieces in Punk & Post-Punk journal was actually submitted by the university for the Research Excellence Framework (REF) which is how research funding is allocated by the government, because it was so original in its discussion.
When Greenbelt started it was new and exciting, demanding that the arts could be part of the church (in its widest sense), and then also opening itself up to experiment and discussion. For many years it understood that if you knew what you believed then you could have an intelligent discussion with, say, a white witch or Buddhist about their beliefs and belief systems; that you could provide a safe space for LGBT people at the festival; and expect professionalism from artistes. There was, of course, some kickback: I remember being told off for selling a book with the word Tarot in the title (the same person did not like it when I suggested that 'occult' simply meant 'secret'); and an art exhibition about The Body we curated was censored because there were male genitalia on show in a very traditional figurative painting. For a while there was a liberal embracing of the arts, but it seems to me it got legalistic and censorious again... People wanted evangelical surety and community involvement rather than professional practice. The only place Greenbelt later seemed to tolerate more open ideas of 'spirituality' was on the music mainstage, where it was happy to promote the likes of Mike Scott from the Waterboys.
Anyway, I am grateful to Greenbelt, Cornerstone, CIVA and many friends and contacts for years of frank discussion about the arts. It still seems to me that Steve Fairnie from Writz was right that musicians who were Christians weren't obliged to sing about, especially only about, their beliefs on stage or albums. After the Fire (ATF) and Writz (later Famous Names, The Technos etc.) were ahead of the game in simply being professional groups who wanted to make music. Nowadays, no-one questions songs about faith and doubt any more, and my students don't even know U2 were sometimes called a Christian band.
ATF and Writz were part of my late 70s and early 80s growing up, and the many concerts I used to go to. In hindsight they both made good pop that stands up to the music around them at the time. I saw U2 at one of their first London gigs thanks to a schoolfriend who had Irish connections. They were a great band, along with the likes of XTC, Simple Minds, Magazine, Talking Heads and loads of others. I saw U2 again the year after but then not until the War tour in Stoke-on-Trent. I think they have at the very least been consistently interesting, although I have not been sold on every album. But I like their discussions about faith and doubt, and I am especially interested in the way they use spectacle to hold a crowd's attention.
Larry Norman is an enigma, who I think I am as attracted to as an outsider and loner as much as a personality and musician. I saw him several times in London in the 70s, spoke to him many times at Greenbelt, and we ended up corresponding in the last few years of his life. Like many musicians he seemed to rely on bullshit and self-publicity to fuel his career, but he could also be wise, profound and produce astonishingly enigmatic and subtle lyrics and music. Norman of course managed to get the blame for starting CCM but also be disregarded by them. At his best, mostly back in the day, he was an accomplished songwriter and performer.
JE: Together with other artist-poets, you create both paintings and poems. In your experience, does that combination change the nature of either or both and what synergies do you see between the two?
RL: They feel like very different activities to me, although occasionally I have written back to paintings, or given them a written context. Mostly, however, I have talked about them, often in interviews or presentations. Painting, for me, is much more about a slow consideration of colour and form and when a piece can be finished, whereas I work much more quickly on each poem's edit and revision. One can keep drafts of poems, but a painting changes every time you add a layer.
JE: How does the making of art compare with the writing of poems for you? What are the similarities and differences?
RL: They are both creative acts, but these days I find it easier to push language around, to play with it, than I do paint. I tend to spend time with my art-in-progress and then add to it, whereas back in the day it was more like writing poems: I would add, sand back, throw paint, let it dry, turn it round, etc. They are both, however, ways for me to answer back myself, to try and answer problems I perhaps stupidly create.
JE: Many of your poems about The Annunciation derive from paintings of that story. What connections between art, poetry and story have inspired you in relation to your exploration of The Annunciation?
RL: I guess my fascination with The Annunciation began with Fra Angelico's Annunciation paintings, especially the ones in Cortona and San Giovanni Valdarno. The latter is probably the least known, and when I first saw it was simply in a room you visited by squeezing through a narrow door next to a church altar. Now, of course, there is a small museum, with an entry fee.
For some reason I became fascinated by the idea of something 'alien' – that is something unfamiliar or other, not a bug-eyed monster – intruding into the human realm, and the effects of that visitation and intervention. There are lots of other Annunciation paintings in Italy of course but I also started researching poems and stories, paintings, sculptures and video art, on the same theme.
My first Annunciation pieces were part of a wider series of poems focussed mostly on Italy, but after that I collaborated with the writer Sarah Cave, who was more interested in Marian theology than me. We did a number of small pamphlets, a booklet, and a Shearsman book together. These included many re-imaginings of annunciations, some silly (a conspiracy poem about CIA being part of AnnunCIAtion), some funny (Joseph moaning about being ignored), some simply working from different versions: romantic, urban, Pre-Raphaelite, abstract, etc.
I'm someone who reads a lot, so I tend to immerse myself in research and then have a burst of writing to generate lots of raw material I can work with and refine. At the moment I am working on a sequence about time travel, memory, nostalgia, history and time itself. I'm not sure what triggered that though, although I know some contemporary ideas of physics and time are in the mix, along with some dystopian fiction.
JE: Your own art practice has included an abstract Stations of the Cross and a series of Tower of Babel paintings. You've said that your paintings are concerned with the spiritual; or perhaps that, as a painter, you are concerned with the spiritual. Yet, you don't think there are any automatic links between the spiritual and art, and that most of what the art world calls spirituality seems to be aesthetic experience. There is a tightrope to be walked here as a painter. How do you walk that tightrope?
RL: Mostly by focussing on the paint (or collage or drawing), the image, itself. You don't learn a new language overnight, so the language of visual art takes time to understand. When you do begin to understand that both figurative and abstract painting use the same language, but the latter is not very interested in narrative, implied or literal, then a whole new world opens up.
The Tower of Babel paintings were very much a response to the visual shape of the tower in traditional paintings, including an image in a Children's Bible that my mum found at the time and returned to me. So it is actually about grids and ascent and colour; and the differences between the individual paintings. I often work in series, so that ideas and images accumulate and differ. I might compare it to the small changes in minimalist music, which the repetition highlights.
The Stations of the Cross series used a sequence of small paintings as contemplative objects. The Stations work using symbolic colour (black/red for crucifixion, blue for Mary) but also contain ideas of books and texts, division and conflict in reoccuring motifs and shapes.
By placing art in a different context there was a new audience, the chance to discuss visual art and also in churches in Exeter and Cornwall to 'use' the work as part of liturgy. The work showed in several UK cathedrals and churches, alongside a medieval altarpiece in a museum, in a hospital and then several small galleries on the West Coast of the United States. The project was partially funded by the Arts Council as part of the millennium celebrations, but also because it was seeking a new audience, perhaps a new or continuing dialogue.
I think as a person I am intrigued by spirituality, mostly from a Christian perspective, although I think the Bible is full of mythology, poetry and elusive parables and stories, not to mention strange visions. I'm currently reading Adam Steiner's new book on
Nick Cave, where he notes that for Cave 'The Bible became a space of creative antagonism', which I find a fascinating idea. Although I don't often draw on the characters and stories of the Bible in the way Cave does, it is part of my life: Noah's Ark, Adam and Eve, the Nativity and many other stories are part of me. I'm fascinated and repulsed by those who take things too literally, and drawn to creative artists like Cave who tough it out in the world, fighting doubt and despair, observing and commenting on life in their work.
So mostly my belief and the accompanying doubt are part of me and therefore inform what I produce which is informed by the world around me: what I hear, read, see, hear and experience. But it is rarely the subject matter of my work, certainly not in any direct or obvious way. I've only just got into Nick Cave's music, but
Leonard Cohen seems another musician who discusses spirituality and faith; and on the book front I'd mention
Tim Winton,
Cormac McCarthy and
Flannery O'Connor. None of them are afraid of (to use a cliché) getting their hands dirty, of the dirty, depressing, spoilt, vicious world we live in. I'm constantly encouraged when I find new authors who come up with different ways to discuss things. Recently I have been reading
Shane McCrae's poetry, which discusses creation and spirituality in his poems about 'The Hastily Assembled Angel'. It's marvellous stuff. It also reminds me to mention the musician and poet
Steve Scott, who urged me and many others at various conferences and in his books to find a useful metaphor and run with it... I haven't quite done that across all my work, but it has certainly informed my thinking and the way I work.
JE: I wonder what Steiner's quote that 'The Bible became a space of creative antagonism' for Nick Cave might mean for you?
RL: That the complexities of The Bible, its contradictory stories and ideas, are an endless source of ideas which challenge, annoy and confuse. If you can't understand it in terms of parables, metaphor, allusion, folklore, mythology and human editing and interference (think about how many other gospels and Bibles books were excluded), let alone how it fits alongside other faiths, it makes no sense at all. That antagonism, is a provocation; The Bible is a book that produces more questions than answers, like all good books do.
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