The Head: an exploration

I recall reading a short time ago the thoughts of a Dutch spiritualist of the 17th century who once proposed that "God is an utterable sigh, lying in the depths of the heart." The thought was in a new book by art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon on Vermeer, and it made me set aside Vermeer in a rush of reflection. There are moments such as this, when we all read or see something that strikes home to us as profoundly important, It is the finding in other minds of something we have failed to express clearly but can immediately recognise in ourselves, something embedded, but unspoken until this moment. Sebastian Franck, who voiced this thought, came to me as a kind of joy, a moment of revelation, after having spent much of my life following some of the principles of the English theologian and scholar, Don Cupitt, who had already invited me to take a step  beyond the literalist reading of religious texts, the 'realism', as he would say, of my Northern Protestant upbringing. Some years ago, I also came across the English sculptor Elizabeth Frink, whose carvings and drawing struck home to a sense in me of the dilemma of our being, of our inheritance as evolved human beings, carvings that spoke to me of what we have left behind in being human, and what also still sits there, one feels, like a brute force that might undermine us at any moment.

In between the Northern Irish presbyterianism and these individuals who helped release me from inherited understandings that constrained rather than fulfilled, came Existentialism. As a young man of the 1960s, a certain Don Phillips offered his challenging outlook, that included an introduction to the existential. Never one to entirely grasp things without a struggle, it has only really been since I returned to making art objects, in medias res, after a lenghly childhood fascination, that I found a means to speak myself. 

These heads, in their various ways, speak of my ongoing sense of the mind's beauty and its terribleness.