Crosses

Meditations and Variations on the Cross I
Collage on paper
30 x 20 cm
1988

Meditations and Variations on the Cross II
Collage on paper
30 x 20 cm
1988

Meditations and Variations on the Cross III
Collage on paper
30 x 20 cm
1988

In 1988, again from the pages of The Boy's Own Paper, I made a set of three studies of the cross. I tried to work them seamlessly as if they were engravings of my own (rather than, as they in fact were, cobbled from the toil of dead hands). That these crosses were vertical with the bar nearer the top placed them unequivocally in the field of Christian reference. At the back of my mind was the remarkable 7th Century Anglo Saxon elegiac poem The Dream of the Rood, in which the Cross speaks of its honour and pain. I had often imagined translating and illustrating it, and these quiet crosses seemed to indicate an appropriate way of doing so.

This large cross with its fiery border I eventually called Brent Cross, after a consumer Xanadu and nightmare mall in North London. Brent, with its old meaning of 'lofty' and its nearness to old forms of 'burnt' (via brennen/brennan) in which it is cognate with 'brand' (which returns it to consuming, by way of fire) pointed my back to The Dream of the Rood: this probably means that the saga does not end here.

Works and Texts (1992), p. 128-30.