Landscape, Sign, Sacrament An Exhibition as Dialogue
With works by Bryan Hawkins and words of David Jones
Norman Rea Gallery, Derwent College, University of York, YO10 5DD 21-24 July, 2016
Tump (photograph) BH, 2010
Albion (found objects, paint and pencil) BH 2010
Does the land wait the sleeping lord or is the wasted land that very lord who sleeps?
David Jones, from The Sleeping Lord and Other Fragments, 1974.
Titania (photograph) BH 2010
The works in the exhibition are placed in the order of, and in relation to, fragments of David Jones’ writings and poetry. David Jones was a maker of extraordinary works across many forms and media. Jones’ work are deeply influenced by his experience of landscape and his works form a magical and transhistorical landscape of the imagination. In each form his works as signa, as signs, point to sacrament and to the materiality of the made signs as works of art and revelation. Jones’ ideas remain significant and his complex vision reaches out to us. The ‘heap of things’ – text and art works - in this exhibition are brought into connection not as explications, resolutions or illustrations but as openings to dialogue. ‘In the Order of Signs’
‘that entanglement of ars, sign, sacrament ‘
‘none of us must allow ourselves to get away with the idea that we can avoid sacrament’
‘there is always a recalling, a representing again…….’
Within these dialogues sign and sacrament.
Within these dialogues entanglements
Within these dialogues a recalling, a representing again ‘or, if the reader won’t stand for that, then (perhaps) intimations of otherness of some sort’.