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As of yesterday you can purchase the cloth-bound box set of eight limited edition prints to celebrate Team GB at the Olympics. All for a cool £6,700. The online art platform Counter Editions has worked with a sterling line up of contemporary artists including Howard Hodgkin, Benjamin Senior, and Sam Taylor-Johnson to put forward their vision for the upcoming Games.
If you only splash out for one print, however, I’d recommend Tracey Emin’s ‘True love Always Wins.’ Her lithograph features Rio’s iconic statue Christ The Redeemer. The snaking mountain road symbolises the winding journey to achieve true love, represented by the outstretched arms of Jesus at the summit.
Emin isn’t everyone’s cup of tea but I’m a fan. I spoke about her piece ‘My Bed’ at one of last year’s Evensong services. On one level the ‘True love Always Wins’ piece is meant to capture the positive energy and optimism fuelling the Team GB athletes and their supporters. And on another it stands as an inspirational statement of hope and faith for everyone. But what I hadn’t realized is that the print also has its own poignancy for the artist herself. Somehow, I had missed the news about her recent marriage…to a rock.
A few months ago Emin revealed that she married a venerable stone that stands in her garden in France. “Somewhere on a hill facing the sea, there is a very beautiful ancient stone, and it’s not going anywhere,” she said. “It will be there, waiting for me.” In another interview she called the stone “an anchor, something I can identify with”. She wore her father’s funeral shroud as a wedding dress at the ceremony.
Emin told the Art Newspaper she had been reading the letters of Pope John Paul II, which revealed his intense, long-term and platonic relationship with the philosopher Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka. The artist, in a time of her life that she describes as celibate, has been contemplating many versions of love that go beyond the body and take on the form of a spiritual journey.
Set against the rather trite piece by David Shrigley (an Olympic torch depicted as an ice cream with the words “life is fantastic”) I think Emin’s little black and blue sketch has weight. The unexpected nature of love and its ability to prevail is a powerful image to represent Britain at a time when it really needs it.
The Revd Alan Ramsey Acting Priest-in-charge
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| | Services
—Tuesdays & Thursdays at 12.15pm
Lunchtime Eucharists —
Sunday 7th August Trinity 11 10.30am - Sung Eucharist
Preacher - Revd Canon Dr Judith Maltby
5pm - Choral Evensong
Preacher - Revd Alan Ramsey Music: Responses: Smith
Canticles: Gibbons, The Short Service
Anthem: Taverner, Mater Christi Sanctissima
Hymn: 245 |
| | Forthcoming Concerts & Other Events— Thistledown Theatre: Emma: Tuesday 2nd August - Saturday 6th August & Tuesday 9th August - Saturday 13th August
From the novel by Jane Austen, adapted by Michael Bloom
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| Poetry Corner
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from Mercian Hymns
1.
King of the perennial holly-groves, the riven sandstone: overlord of the M5: architect of the historic rampart and ditch, the citadel at Tamworth, the summer hermitage in Holy Cross: guardian of the Welsh Bridge and the Iron Bridge: contractor to the desirable new estates: saltmaster: moneychanger: commissioner for oaths: martyrologist: the friend of Charlemagne.
‘I liked that,’ said Offa, ‘sing it again.’
Geoffrey Hill (8 June 1932 – 30 June 2016)
Image: Offa’s Dyke
August 2nd is the feast day of St Alfreda, a hermitess and daughter of King Offa of Mercia. Offa ruled from 757-796. 1200 years later, Geoffrey Hill (former Oxford Professor of Poetry, who died in June) wrote ‘Mercian Hymns’, in which Offa and Hill as a youngster merge, lapping memory and place. The two share more than geography: it is unclear, later in the poem, who is speaking, who is referred to. This first ‘verset’ (as Hill called them) overlays temporal periods so that the Anglo-Saxon king is not only the historical friend of Charlemagne but also ‘overlord of the M5’. The poem makes him as much a 20th-century figure as an 8th-century one; we don’t learn facts about him, but rather form impressions. Perhaps we are primarily interested in the past as a reflector of the present.
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