There will be a break in transmission after tonight until Thursday or Friday. The reason is that I will be travelling down to Worcester tomorrow in order to hang my Green Man series in the Cathedral there. We will be making something of a holiday about it, calling in to have lunch with a former colleague on the way south. The actual work of hanging the display will take place on Wednesday, and we will return to Bradford on Thursday. There will, no doubt, be time for a limited amount of wining and dining, and perhaps a little tourism too. The weather is forecast to be good.
Although we are both looking forward to the break it will involve a certain amount of hard work. (I hope the cathedral will have a trolley of some kind, so that the labour of moving sixteen picture frames, plus ancillary tat, is not too heavy going.) I have shown my work there on a previous occasion, when I took the Set Apart series there, so I have a pretty good idea of how the system works, and the actual business of hanging ought to be technically much less complicated, and much less effort, than the event last year in Lincoln Cathedral. Apart from anything else, Lincoln is huge and everything has to be carried a long way.* I’m quite looking forward to working in the more modest dimensions of Worcester.
The Green Man series has undergone a certain amount of development since its last outing. A fair number of the signs have been changed, reflecting the fact that now I have a rather clearer ideal of what I want to communicate. There is one novelty about which I have to confess I have a certain degree of caution regarding how it might be received. The historic figure of the Green Man is invariably masculine, with a rather detached and even a critical regard towards the human beings he surveys from his elevated architectural locations. I have asked myself the question, how might that regard be different if we allow ourselves to imaging that it is the gaze of a woman? What might this communicate that is novel about our understanding of the relationship between creation and the human race? A small corner of my head is anxious that somebody will jump to the conclusion that I am smuggling a Goddess figure into a Christian ecclesiastical setting.
*If you have not been there, I reckon that it might be possible to land an aircraft in the nave of Lincoln Cathedral, and the Chapter House is ar least as big as most parish churches.