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At the end of his analysis of Piero della
Francesca’s Baptism of Christ, the art historian Philip Hendy
concludes:
Colour and light are here inseparable.
In unison they create the atmosphere of the picture, physical and
spiritual; and it is no more possible to distinguish the physical
from the spiritual than it is the colour from
the light.1
The twentieth-century artist has come a
long way since then. The painstaking depiction of the Umbrian landscape
in paint by Piero della Francesca can now be captured in thousands
of different ways. Reality can be reproduced in its minutest detail
so that each glint of light bouncing off water can be reproduced
in any number of media – photography, cinema, video. If nature
contains, as artist John Ruskin thought, the essence of the spirit,
of spirituality itself, then surely now is the time to observe it.
Dion Ellis’s video installation Entrance is realistic. It might
even be said that it is as realistic as image can be. Its format
echoes reality too: a landscape screen, a viewing experience that
is a combination of cinema and television, a walk-in movie. Western
culture is obsessed with different forms of reality: the ever-popular
nature programme takes us inside a lion’s den; human life,
warts and all, confronts viewers of The Royle Family; the entire
nation is transfixed by Big Brother. In the end we do not watch
these representations of reality in search of an ever-increasing
closeness to it. We watch them in order to go beyond reality: to
realise that the lion’s life is quite mundane, to gain insight
into the family unit and what makes it tick, for psychological and
human insight into various individuals in Big Brother. In other
words, reality is only the starting point for abstract speculation
about the nature of personality, the complexities of family life,
for lions or the Royles.
It must not be forgotten that both reality and spiritual realisation
are humanly wrought, and that the artist brings a set of skills,
intentions and imagination to the quest to understand reality. Entrance
is a slow-motion video projection of a waterfall. It was inspired
by many different things: readings about the significance of water
for the human physical and spiritual condition, the beauty of waterfalls
in nature, and the specific beauty of places like the Becka and
Canonteign Falls in Dartmoor. In conceiving the work for Portsmouth
Cathedral, Ellis took her cue from the baptismal font, which occupies
a central position on the main access of the Church, and is thus
different from other places of worship. The artist read the words
of St Cyril of Jerusalem that run round the edge of the font, drawing
inspiration from them.
...down into the water it was like night and you could see nothing:
but when you came up again it was like finding yourself in the day.
That one moment was your death and your birth: that saving water
was both your grave and your mother.
It is important to ask how much Ellis’s slice of reality takes
us beyond ourselves, makes us question what is depicted and gives
us insight into the meaning of water and rocks glistening in the
sunlight. Entrance points us back towards reality itself, towards
the ‘liquid vastness, the triumph of motion, of momentum over
the immovable’2 and to realise that the ‘narratives of
our mortality, from birth to death, are visited frequently through
the medium of water, the element which sustains life’.3 In
directing the viewer back to reality, Ellis opens up the realm of
the spirit.
1. Philip Hendy, Piero della Francesca and the Early Renaissance,
Weidenfeld and Nicholson 1968, p. 71. 2. Poem by Burton quoted in
Edward C. Rashleigh, Among the Waterfalls of the World, Jarrolds,
1935, p. 53. 3. The Art of Bill Viola, A Theological Reflection,
Bill Viola Essay by David Jasper in The Messenger. Catalogue published
by The Chaplaincy to the Arts and Recreation in North East England,
ed F. Sparrow, p. 13. .
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