Feed the 5000 Biennial opening night Independent District

Julian Broadhurst

Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King

18 September - 28 November

Eight Crucifixions - An Adoration of the Cathedral's Geometry

Work by Julian Broadhurst: 'My passion is for an an aesthetic of pure shape and pure form'. The art is given by the artist to 'the fabric of the cathedral in trust for the people of Liverpool'.

Eight Cruxifixions

A 1200 x 1700 mm ink Black print on a laminate panel, comprising eight 'Geometric constructions over montages of the Cathedral's groundplan' - November 2002. Donated to the Fabric of the Cathedral in trust for the people of Liverpool April 24 2003.

I have not, nor did I intend to represent or depict the Crucifixion in this work. It is not a rendering of it in abstracted form. Rather the 'Language' of my work, its syntax, is one of pure shape. I have spent my life in Geometric Art, deriving a Visual language from pure shape, the Triangle, the Square, the Circle et al. These Elements are the 'Given' basis of the Art I call Elementalism; Eight Crucifixions is an Elementalist work. One analogy of this type of abstraction is Music, because it, like Pure Shape, is constituted of composed elements of Pure Sound.

This is the last in a series of works based on the Ground plan Geometry of the Cathedral, called 'Sacred Circles', after the circles defining its groundplan. I promised the Cathedral Authorities one of these works but then, the title 'Eight Crucifixions', insisted itself upon me and I knew that an entirely new work was called for. In November 2002 I began by assembling the montages of the groundplans I would use as a base. I then drew in each a Geometric Tracery, to a tight set of rules I devised for the purpose; giving a distinct family of patterns, but with each one differing in some measure. They are then Variations on this rule plan. The Work was completed through an industrial process of printing and mounting.

I followed the great Ceri Richards, in his panel for the Chapel of the Blessed Sacrament, by nominating mine as an Altarpiece. To my mind it has a spirituality, principally in that a meditation on pure shape is always revealing, perhaps a spiritual act. However to be true to the title to which, for which, it was composed, the multi-layering of stars could be read as 'Crowns of thorns', eight of them, but let these also be seen as echoes in an Adoration of the Cathedral. As an artist I merely invite people to contemplate, multiply.