THE BIBLE

The Bible has a dual nature. On the one hand it is a body of information dealing mainly with spiritual and moral matters, describing God, God’s world and God’s people. On the other hand it is an object, a block of paper made sacred by the marks printed on its surfaces. Sacred to Christians, the Bible also has parallels with the Torah of Judaism and the Q’uran of Islam, as all three texts form the basis for exclusive monotheistic faiths based on the written word.

These texts are regarded by many as instances of divine revelation, literally the word(s) of God. They are revered in themselves as holy objects, and in earlier times their reproduction bound together the manual act of writing and the act of worship.

To some extent every book possesses this duality, being at the same time a specific body of information and an embodiment of the idea of the written or printed word being empowering and liberating. The duality can be seen, for example, in the film footage of public book burnings in Nazi Germany – irrespective of their academic or literary merits, the destruction of books is shocking to us (although less shocking than the public burning of authors and translators in previous centuries).

The defacing or destruction of the Bible also carries with it the shock of blasphemy, an attack on God, on Christianity and on Christian culture. I have not defaced or destroyed the Bible in the making of this piece. Rather, I have removed pages and used them to fashion an image of the crucified Christ, as part of a two-thousand-year iconographic tradition. The background of the image, and to the story of Christ, is the Old Testament. For the figure of Jesus I used print from the New Testament. Between the two is the cross, which I covered with the white spaces from page edges of the New Testament. Jesus is in effect the embodiment of the New Testament, the living words on its pages, the Word of God.

The death and resurrection of Jesus are the pivotal point of Christianity. The first version of this piece seems to stop with death, a body enclosed by the pages of a book as if mummified, or enclosed in a shroud. In a more general sense this represents the stasis and permanence of the printed word, its perceived authority over the more dynamic medium of the spoken word, and the perceived need to always ‘capture’ other more intuitive or transcendent modes of perception in words.

An image that might come to mind when viewing this piece is that of a pupa enclosed in a chrysalis, undergoing metamorphosis. As an alternative to death, authority and verbalisation I produced a second piece based on the idea of resurrection. In this, the body of Jesus has burst out of the pages of the New Testament, leaving behind a paper shell in the shape of His crucified body.

From the Christian perspective this represents the possibility of direct personal experience of God, as was suggested during the Reformation by the translation of the Bible into unmediated contemporary English and its dissemination to ordinary people.

More generally, it represents an acknowledgement of intuitive, transcendent or visionary experience as a valid part of human experience, especially in a secular age in which religion and spirituality have been monetised by globalisation and the secular myth of Progress.