Myth And The Goddess
The first images of man delicately drawn inside a cave 20,000 years ago were of a shaman surrounded by his mythical imagination. Shamans are true artists, their role in society to open the doors to the profane. The article below was published in resurgence magazine.
A Once and Future Form: Jacob Lane's Sculptures at Sharpham
Jules Cashford
ON A SOFT sunny day in December, with the leaves still falling from the beech trees, I went for a walk with Jacob Lane through the hills and glades of Sharpham, where his magnificent granite and wood sculptures rise up from the land like beings from a timeless age.
Sharpham in Devon is an extraordinarily beautiful private estate which the dear late Maurice Ash generously established as a Trust, and Jacob was given the freedom to create sculptures for the genius of the place and the spirit of the time. His work took him two years to complete, and he was drawn to celebrate an intuitive response to the natural world, in which there where no divisions between human and nature, no attempt to control.
Maurice and Jacob shared the belief that not only were we living in a fragmented world but that Art itself had become fragmentary. Such art was no longer able to enact its traditional role of healing the dualisms of life so prevalent in our time. Perhaps contemporary art was even contributing to our separation from the wonder and mystery of life?
Jacob's work by contrast reaches for relationships between things - human beings and nature's being - and finds them all woven together in the great Web of Life. So his sculptures fall effortlessly into the language and imagery of myth, the universal conversation, in particular the myth of the Goddess which explores the mystery of our relationship to an eternal source through feeling, intuition and intimate presence on Earth.
An elusive Goddess figure with waving arms welcomes us near the gates at the entrance. She might have been a descendent of the Minoan Snake Goddess from 1500 BC Crete still calling us across the millennia, she who holds out two withering snakes in her outstretched hands, reminding us that life and death are both in her care, whatever we oppose she contains and resolves.
Metamorphosis
CLOSE TO THE house an imposing Henry Moore rests on the crest of a hill, with views sweeping down through vales of trees to the river below. It was the first of Moore's sculptures to differentiate the basic block of stone into two forms, a man and a woman. It must have been inspiring for Jacob to create something within breathing distance of Moore's figures. Jacob's immense wooden chrysalis hangs nearby on a curved steel arc 16 feet tall, as though the intricate processes of metamorphosis were cradled in the overhanging scythe of mortality.
Jacob told me that most of his work at Sharpham explores the theme of metamorphosis, and here he had taken the idea of the small and marvelous chrysalis and enlarged it to become a part of the landscape, echoing its meaning in macrocosm. Such an image was a favourite of Coleridge's for its analogy to the Imagination which also 'leaves room' for the life that is to come - psyche - which the Greeks called both butterfly and soul.
In Mycenaean culture (1500 BC) tiny golden chrysalises were placed in the honeycombed tombs of the dead so that their souls might shed their immortal casings and put on the brilliant wings of butterflies, flying as transformed beings into their eternal home. Here, the rich full curves of the chrysalis, fashioned from a sweet chestnut tree brought down by the gales of 1988, seem to swing in hiatus between two planes of being, almost on the point of moving yet remaining hypnotically still.
Lagoon Piece
Walking down the magnificent valley to the lagoon which lies to the side of the winding river Dart - shining in the sun like an egg within the coils of a serpent - you glimpse through the reeds a number of upright pillars of stone rising out of the water, bringing visions of Carnak to mind, as though several of them had migrated from the flat open fields of Brittany and come to rest in Devon in the still waters of Sharpham, in the company of trees, shadows, reflections and ducks. When I went to Carnak I had a dream that the stones were 'points of consciousness' - a voice told me firmly - and here too the pillars are distinctly alive with thoughts and sensibilities and attitudes. There are seven of them standing together, each with their own point of view: at the centre is the stone pillar which culminates in the horned curve of the Moon, shedding its invisible light on the neighbouring stones of the Eye Goddess, The Horned God, The Horned Snake, The Phallus - double phallic, some might say, as the stones are phallic to begin with, sun-lovers to the Goddess whose shimmering waters receive and return their reflections continually.
One of these stone figures has whirling circles of energy inscribed upon its side, in the tradition of the spiral and circular designs cut into the megalithic stones of Malta, New Grange and France. This is a piece full of paradoxes - both earthbound and skyward, timeless and temporal. Each granite stone comes from Dartmoor and weighs a ton and is held in place by 40 foot piles driven into the mud, yet the vibrant energy of the stone spires speaks of the ever-renewing tides of birth and death as eternity enters time. Even the lagoon itself is eloquent of an original wildness - trees left lying where they fell, rushes and nettles sprawling where they please - as though genially overlooked by the gentle but precise eye of Capability Brown who designed the estate.
Janus
Following the path beside the beech woods you come upon a figure of Janus, the god with two heads who looks both ways. The name, Janus, comes from the Latin ianua, meaning 'door', but, dictionaries aside, it may rather be that Janus gives his name to door, the gods preceding us, like Rilke says, the myth existing before the myth began. This Janus has two male heads, like a Herm, with carved hinges on its sides, as though at any moment it would swing open, just as the head of Janus swings on the hinge of the year in January, the month which bears his name. Is this the hinge upon which the world turns - the still moment of the turning world - the inner as well as the outer world, the hinge of any new enterprise, which, at its inception, still stares behind into the past and gazes ahead into the future, imagining old and new forms together. Horns with leaves evoke the spirit of Jack o' the Green, yet there is also a hand held up to halt the traveler and ask for a toll, as though to say 'do not pass mindlessly, pause and reflect.' So also did the lions of the Palaeolithic temples of rock and the fierce winged daemons of later times, who stand at the threshold and warn us: Do not enter with a literal mind. A key suggests that some things are closed to us, or again they may be opened if the mind is right: 'Knock and it shall be opened unto you...' In a wintry forest such thoughts follow the flickering brown leaves of beech still clinging to their stems and lose themselves in the sway of the branches as the wind runs through them, and soon forget where they began and do not mind... A second Janus figure, carved in wood, has bees swarming between the heads, too many, as though to split them apart and fall into chaos. The relation between the two heads is important, then, the ability to see both ways keeping us from 'Single Vision and Newton's Sleep,' as Blake would say.
The Fish
Fish, oh fish, so little matters,' D. H Lawrence once wrote. Yet this granite pike, guardian of the serpentine river on whose bank it rests, makes everything matter. 10 feet long, once a parish boundary stone and now a stone of the threshold between earth and water, it stops us in surprise. Why is it raised up on the bank on not swimming in the water? Is it because, dissolving boundaries, it can lead us across different dimensions of being - swimming in the air, moving but still - and yet, poised upon boundaries and guarding them, it can remind us of 'temenos', that 'sacred space' which has its own laws which have to be honoured? I think of the Neolithic stone fish of the Goddess, all fifty of them, clustered on a bank of the Danube in the shape of a vulva, lovingly arranged by the river people 7000 years ago.
Towards the end of our journey, as we climbed the hill back up to the house, we reflected upon the nature of art. Art, for Jacob, reaches into Nature through Myth, and the very universality of myth supports and disciplines the impersonal nature of true creative expression, where artists are so at one with their work that their individuality is subsumed. Yet after the self has been relinquished one might go on to wonder whether ultimately the characters of artists were not now more than ever crucial for their vision of Nature. In Blake's immortal words: 'As a man is, so he sees. As the Eye is formed, such are its powers. To a Man of Imagination Nature is Imagination itself.' In this respect Jacob is indeed a Man of Imagination, and so his sculptures give generous and plastic form to myths both old and new, for though the images may have originated long ago their universality is presented through so modern a medium of wood and stone that they claim our allegiance as a vital way of rethinking our relationship to Nature. His work embodies the wisdom of a unified vision whose mythic image is the Goddess, a vision which holds sacred the body of Earth and all life upon Earth, and whose story is the Universe.
Jules Cashford is the author of Moon and Myth.