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Drawing Circles Inside the Square
Looking broadly at the topic of local architectural heritage and urban design, the exhibition Reconstruction: conversations on a city will be a major feature of the Gallery's programme when we reopen. Here, through a selected group of artworks, curator Ken Hall takes a brief historical visual tour of Cathedral Square, one of the city's best-known spaces, and finds himself in a landscape rendered barely recognisable.
B.W. Mountfort The Lamb of God and the Hierarchy of Angels (Rose Window, Christ Church Cathedral). Stained glass window by Clayton and Bell c.1881–2. Photo: Stephen Estall, 1998. Collection of Stephen Estall
In his short story Cathedral, the American writer Raymond Carver describes a meeting between two strangers, one of whom, a recently arrived house guest and friend of the narrator's wife, is blind. Inspired or impaired by several glasses of Scotch, some smoked weed and a randomly discovered documentary on late-night television, the men enter a hazy conversation about cathedrals, with hypothetical musings about gargoyles, flying buttresses, and the faith of past days. 'In those olden times, when they built cathedrals, men wanted to be close to God ... You could tell this from their cathedral-building.' No major further conclusions are reached. The tale ends with the blind man asking the narrator to describe a cathedral for him in as much detail as he can, then convincing him to close his eyes and make a drawing, which he wishes to follow by placing his hand across the active, pencil-clutching hand. It's an unusually moving tale, and one that lingers. It stirs up many thoughts, one of which is that a traditional European cathedral is indeed a strange and extraordinary idea.
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