Each week I send out a short, fresh reflection from the road – photographs, sketches, and observations from old places that still have something to teach us. What follows is a moment from those travels.
'I'm just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her.''
Notting Hill
I’m just a porch standing in front of a church looking for a person to spark me into life.
I’m in Malmesbury and I’m stood outside my van feeling a little frustrated. My 360 virtual reality cam is playing up. The battery has a loose connection. I was hoping to get a virtual shot of the porch at Malmesbury Abbey.
Now that I’m stood in front of the porch, my disappointment has been dissipated. This is one of the marvels of medieval England: In Nikolaus Pevsner’s words, it is one of ‘the best pieces of Norman sculpture and decoration in England’
The day is blessed with a rare quality of light which allows the pattern and iconography on the eight orders of the C12th porch to fizz into life.
The light is storyboarding the building and unravelling the beliefs, hopes and fears of the medieval mind by pricking out the small medallions and their contents within.
The contents tell the story of time itself from the creation to salvation. Many of the roundels are remarkably intact and reveal vignettes that I remember from my childhood: David and Goliath, Samson and the Lion and Noah and the Ark.
Then I notice more carvings beyond the entrance and walk into the porch to see them. And, in one of those rare moments of correspondence with the past, it hits me: here, stood in the centre of the porch, I’m being embraced by a narrative.
On the tympanum over the door is a depiction of Christ surrounded by angels. To the left and right of me, on the east and west walls of the porch, are carvings of the apostles with angels floating above their heads.
They’re achingly beautiful - with swirling swags and patterns that underpin the ecstasy of the moment. They remind me of the ripples in a pond - as if the Christ in Majesty on the tympanum is impacting every molecule of their being.
But the apostles are set apart and talking and nodding their heads - their feet tell us that they’re grounded in the here and now, coping with their earthly reality with hope for the future. It’s a scene that goes beyond the theocentric message of the day. It’s a theme that is inherently human: they’re just like us.
Stood here in this wrap around space, I’m reminded of David Hockney’s Joiners' art which, through a montage of photographs, combine several perspectives to make an image that embraces a scene. Hockney’s work reveals a truth that is hidden in plain sight: the things we see and experience aren’t from one fixed perspective.
Hockney has spent a lifetime trying to create a work of art that defines the truth that replicates the nuance of our visual experience. But here, at Malmesbury, several hundred years before Hockney, they did it with stone and mortar and volume and light.
I can’t help but sense that I’m at the heart of a space built to create a medieval virtual reality as impactful as the VR images created by my 360 cam.
The porch tally’s up the visual embrace with the passage of time. Transitioning from the exterior to the interior, the observer finds themselves at the heart of the narrative, traversing realms of myth and legend to the grounded realities depicted by the apostles. This journey culminates in a heavenly vista, brimming with promise and aspiration
Arriving at the sweet spot the observer becomes the fuse that sparks it into life, and the vessel they’ve ignited reveals a flicker of the latent memory captured within the stone.
The porch at Malmesbury is mesmerising. It is a place that goes beyond virtual reality - one that includes the observer and a fourth dimension of time within a structure that is a portal in more ways than one.
Readers of the Genius Loci Digest
What stays with readers
That aura, those echoes - the muted light is transporting. What a space to feel rooted in history. I'd love to make that journey myself; you've stirred the opera lover and architectural dreamer in me.
From the heritage portfolio
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