Statement on Routine and Ritual Series


‘ I am interested in how routine forms part of our everyday existence, and how ritual can be a time to stop and reflect.

Whether we realise it or not all of us are drawn to the comforts of ritual, they structure our lives. Ritual is more than the regular pattern of behaviour, it’s about culture and identity, helping to bring order where there is chaos.’

‘ Everyday life is marked by a continuous, predictable and unpredictable, series of shifts between the marked and the unmarked, the sacred and the profane. Daily life is studded with ritual times and spaces’.

R Silverstone in ‘Television and Everyday Life’ (1994) London Routledge

Routine and Ritual

This body of work started life as a video sketchbook of ideas concerning cleaning rituals and developed into an edited video, a sound piece, a short documentary and a series of still life paintings.

The source of the video surrounded the cleaning activities of two women who clean the brasses and other sacred objects used in the service of the Mass.

What initially caught my attention was how the women were performing a private secular ritual, within an institution where ceremonial ritual is seen and performed publicly. The cleaning rituals were showing the underside of the church we do not see. When the women talked about their routine I recognised the metaphor in their activity. They were addressing the secular rituals that are embedded in our lives where ritual and habit intersect.

The polishing of these sacred objects compare to the polishing of Trench Art. Soldiers used to make Trench Art from shrapnel found on the battlefields of war. Treasured objects such as letter openers or a pair of polished shells were then sent home to loved ones. Most items, being made of brass, tarnish quickly; giving rise to a domestic routine of cleaning and polishing which had therapeutic effects for the bereaved of the soldiers who never returned. So obsessive did this polishing become that over decades personal inscriptions were erased almost completely.

I found it interesting how the cleaning of Trench Art as with the cleaning of religious objects used in the service of the Mass, both symbolically fetishise death and ritualise survival. Even the mundane ritual of cleaning can also be meaningful as in the cleaning of Trench Art.


Paintings

Artists have referred to ritual throughout the History of Art, Juan Sanchez Cotan’s still life compositions of his monastic life of ritual abstinence, to Andy Warhol’s repeated images of Brillo pads and cans of soup.

My work is a ritual within a ritual, as painting is a ritual act in itself. The paintings juxtapose the sacred with the profane, a tin of Brasso alongside a crucifix, or a vestment alongside a duster. Some of the still life paintings are painted in a careful, ritualistic manner, yet others, such as the dusters and the red vestments, are painted with loose broad brushstrokes. I use photography as an aid to my work, as daylight is in a constant state of flux. The paintings look at ritual in relation to contemporary culture and identity.