North Dulwich through an amber spyglass

I was probably the only person in the park who noticed it....it took my breath away

Midwinter Sunset, Dulwich Picture Gallery Sculpture Garden, London, England

In the final year of her life, the artist Tirzah Garwood was in a nursing home dying from cancer, largely confined to bed. She had already lost her first husband, Eric Ravilious, on actve service as a war artist. Now, though happily remarried, she knew that her three children would soon be orphaned.

Yet she described that final year as the happiest of her life. Working on small wooden boards, propped up against pillows, she produced an incredible volume of work. Her haunting, slightly uncanny pictures of everyday things – children’s toys, farm animals, a 90 year old lady gardening in the grounds, are on display at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in a long-overdue retrospective exhibition. Through all her difficulties – raising a young family, marrying outside her social class to the dismay of her parents, widowhood, financial difficulty, a mastectomy and primitive chemotherapy, she went on making art in numerous mediums – wood-printing, paper-marbling, sketching, collage, quilting, painting - and maintained a rich social life and a circle of close friendships. Yet for far too long she was overshadowed by the achievements of her famous husband.¹

Her work reveals an original, wry observation of the social codes of the early 20^th century (she was born in 1908) and, at times, a sense of the uncanny bordering on surrealism. A childlike quality in her compositions of symmetrical buildings and children’s toys belies their complexity. It’s a great exhibition and I’d encourage you to go.

And yet that turned out not to be the highlight of my day.

I believe in miracles, though they tend not to turn up if you go around looking for them. I don’t necessarily mean events like supernatural healings; I mean the kind of encounter with something greater than ourselves, a Divine ideal of beauty that we unconsciously long for yet very really experience.

When I emerged from the gallery into the surrounding Sculpture Garden, it was bitterly cold, there was already a clear waxing moon high over the grand houses of North Dulwich and the sun, just peeping out from behind leafless trees, looked like a burnished copper penny about to dip below the horizon. There was just about time for me to see the sculptures.

A ring of nine oak tree stumps caught my eye. Up close, they shared the slight uncanniness of Garwood’s late paintings. They looked completely natural, yet all were exactly the same shape and the same tree, shown from different orientations. The lack of any growing, organic matter on them was the only thing that gave the game away. They were in fact an installation:

Created by husband-and-wife artistic duo Rob and Nick Carter, Bronze Oak Grove consists of nine oak tree stumps cast in bronze and arranged in a circle, which brings to life a drawing of a tree stump made in 1600 by Dutch artist Jacob de Gheyn II (c.1565-1629). …. Consisting of a process of traditional ‘lost wax’ bronze casting techniques and advanced 3D scanning and printing, Rob and Nick reimagined de Gheyn’s intricate pen and ink drawing into a realistic tree stump.

“Dulwich Picture Gallery acquires first artwork in 12 years — Bronze Oak Grove sets the tone for new sculpture garden”

Why bother, you might ask? Why go to all the trouble of recreating a 400 year old work of art in this complicated, labour intensive way? True, children can climb on it, but they can climb on any old rock without getting involved in this complicated process of artistic homage.

In fact, why bother making art at all? It’s a conversation I would love to have had with Tirzah Garwood from her hospital bed. I think the answer is that art is a conversation, an encounter, an exploration of what is interesting or beautiful and the response that invites from us. And it’s a dynamic thing, contingent upon a whole chain of consequences and coincidences.

“If you came this way

Taking any route, starting from anywhere,

At any time or at any season,

It would always be the same: you would have to put off

Sense and motion…..

Here, the intersection of the timeless moment

Is England and nowhere. Never and always.”

T.S Eliot, “Little Gidding”

Underneath the patina of plastic, these tree stumps were cast in bronze. If I’d gone for a cup of tea, or on a different day, or under different weather conditions, or if I hadn’t lingered despite the cold and looked really carefully, I never would have seen that the bronze beneath the surface was reflecting the setting sun with an extraordinarily beautiful, almost other-worldly radiance. I was probably the only person in the park who noticed it. It took my breath away. It was beautiful enough to change my life, and convince me that there is a world of imagination and wonder beyond the daily visible stuff, one that we very really see.

And for me that counts as a miracle. There’s an extravagance about it. It’s a gift of grace – I’d done nothing to deserve such an experience or even to expect it, except turning up with an open mind.

I tried, and largely failed, to capture the effect on my phone. But in fact I didn’t need to, since I’m unlikely to forget it. If, one day, I lie in a nursing home knowing my days are numbered, I’ll remember that glimpse of beauty that suggests what might be to come beyond the earthly, and I’ll understand why Tirzah Garwood could say that final year, spent in confinement and pain, was the most productive of her life.

I can’t tell you how to have an experience like that, but I hope you do sooner or later. Just keep your eyes open and be ready to overlook, at least some of the time, all the chaos and despair in the world, and expect an encounter with beauty. I’m not going to tell anyone what religion they ought to follow. The closest I probably get to a holy book myself is Philip Pullman’s The Amber Spyglass. Pullman invented a substance called Dust, which is made up of charged particles, mostly invisibly to the naked eye, that gather around an object whenever it is encountered by the consciousness of human beings. Dust is essential to human flourishing in the cosmology of His Dark Materials, and his character Mary Malone, a scientist who finds herself in an alternate world where ecology is threatened by its escape, is able to build a special telescope to detect it, and to see the wonderful moment when the natural order is restored through Will and Lyra’s actions:

“She put the spyglass to her eye, but held back and returned it to her pocket. There was no need for the glass; she knew what she would see; they would seem to be made of living gold. They would seem the true image of what human beings could be, once they had come into their inheritance.”

(The Amber Spyglass, chapter 35)

In Pullman’s moral universe, the most important thing that we human beings can do for one another, is to tell our stories. Tell stories of hope and connection, of beauty and joy and wonder. Nothing matters more. So I am telling you mine.

1. Her autobiography, “Long Live Great Garfield” is published by Persephone Books.