Cathedral of my Soul

The Cathedral of my Soul is a large experiential sculptural painting installation. The first edition of this installation will be made and installed in the artist's clear-ceiling studio courtyard in London, with additional pieces as site-specific installations to follow.

In its first iteration, two twenty-meter long curtains of raw canvas hang from the clear perspex roof of Howe's studio courtyard, like a sinuous snake evoking Christo's Running Fence or Richard Sera's Elipse sculptures. The raw canvas is painted in-situ, loaded with oil paint and solvent via a variety of delivery methods, from pouring to spraying with an industrial insecticide sprayer, brushwork, and even the artist's hands squeezing, rubbing, and coaxing the material into the canvas.

As the canvas accepts its identity as a painting, pulling the color into its raw and unprotected fibers, it becomes complex on its face but remains its fundamental self underneath. The painting, when viewed from behind, no matter how complex the face becomes, maintains a diaphanous, indistinct fleshy glow as light filters through the space into the inviting, warm, glowing walkway created between the curtains of the painting.

A gentle hum is heard from inside the painting space, as directed audio created by artist Ronen Porter lifts your affect and wraps it in a sense of bittersweet care.

The raw, unprotected, oil-painted canvas has a human life span, as soon as it is in contact with the paint and turps, it changes, the "mortality" clock begins to run as the jewel-like heavy metals and the toxic chemicals they are suspended in hang in the threads of the canvas and consume it at the same time.

I am inside the secret of its beating heart, past its beautiful facade, the air of the space from the surface of the painting to the stone walls of this cathedral rife with signification, language, attempts, living self consciously in the vibration of this moment, its lovely like a garden is lovely, but I still have access to my thinking, feeling mind.

Walking down through its folds into the center, to the inside of this painting, into the space from the back of the painting to the back of its other wall, like the insides of the lining of an artery or vein, the smooth coating of the fascia of the container of your heart, I enter the glowing, still, sunlit air. The air has a color, I am bathing in the light of the essence of the painting, my skin is magenta. As sunlight spills in through the glass roof overhead, I feel suddenly that this is what remains after language ends.

Inside this place, all is as it is, in its ineffable change and inevitable decay, time slows enough for me to notice the thickness of the membrane of the canvas, its lived outer skin, observed and interacted with, its pregnant fibers, gorged on oil paint like caviar, suspended in the beautiful toxic liquid which set its mortality clock spinning. The canvas reached for this nourishment, chose to come alive, slurped and sucked, and held in the pouches of its cheeks every drop it could keep. There’s hardly any paint on the wall or floor. The raw, naked blank of the canvas wanted it all. Its fleshy body filled out, spun into existence, and has started on the path to death. It will slowly consume itself over the next hundred years. It has a human lifespan.

It is not more valuable now than it will be later or was before, though as its life shortens, the amount of money it is traded for will change. This has nothing to do with its beauty, value, or purpose, it is a factual, historical timeline of the incidence of the life of the painting, running parallel to its timeline.