Gail Flockhart - Archive Work

These clips include examples from my BA through 2003-2006 and other video sketches. Thematically driven, these observations stem from a rationale to explore issues of mortality and meaning. They are often provoked by meditations on how religion and spirituality are increasingly marginalised or commodified within secular society.Suzi Gablik remarks on Julian Schnabel’s ‘Portrait of God’ that God, ‘is just another image to manipulate’, and she concludes, ‘it is difficult to believe in the prophetic consciousness of someone so frankly out to get what he wants – personal success in the New York art world, not metaphysical truths’ (cited in Pattison 1998: 6).¹ I feel that whilst it is an impossibly dense subject, it is these metaphysical truths I seek through art practice.In some of these works, it is the ephemeral quality of life, that is itself compelling and beautiful. At the point where words evaporate, symbolic, visual metaphors express something more, or other, about the inexplicable. As George Pattison articulates, ‘…the work of art is not a copy but an analogy of what we find in nature’.² Merleau-Ponty asserts the primacy and integrity of vision, ‘whether in perception or in art: there is no getting behind what takes place in vision since our perception of the world as a world itself takes place within vision. There is no ‘ghost story’ in art.’ Ponty does not accept the notion that the mental image is ‘a tracing, a copy, a second thing’,³ in other words, it creates something new.Faith and belief provide a phenomenology of religion, but theologians and faith communities are challenged (or at least should be), by the fundamental question of the meaning of being. Transcending all we may experience through reason, Gandhi spoke in 1931 saying, ‘There is an indefinable mysterious power that pervades everything, I feel it though I do not see it. It is this unseen power which makes itself felt and yet defies all proof … It transcends the senses. … I confess that I have no argument to convince through reason. Faith transcends reason…’.⁴Life hints at death, always; nothing stays the same, caught in a cycle of life, death and rebirth, all is in flux, everything is moving, changing, evolving, the material of life points towards the intangible and transcending force, which moves all things.

¹ Pattison, G (1998) Art, Modernity and Faith – Restoring the Image Towards a Theology of Art. 2nd Revised edition. London: SCM Press (from S Gablik, Has Modernism Failed?, London/New York, Thames and Hudson, 1984, p90 & 97).
² ibid p55
³ ibid p143 (citing M Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1973, p285).
⁴ Gandhi, (1931) Gandhi Serve Foundation: Mahatma Gandhi Research and Media Service: Spiritual Message (On God). [Online] Available from http://www.gandhiserve.org/information/listen_to_gandhi/lec_1_on_god/augven_spiritual_message.html [Accessed 22nd October 2006]