by Julie Clague

Drawing inspiration from Renaissance artist Giovanni di Paolo (d. 1482) and the religious art of Henri Matisse (d. 1954), textile artist and silk screen printer, Pauline Caulfield has designed and produced vestments and altar frontals since her student days in the 1960s. Here, one of Britain’s most important contemporary liturgical artists talks to Julie Clague and Open House Scotland about her Catholic faith and its influence on her ecclesiastical art.

When I was at the Royal College of Art, there was no such thing as far as I knew as a Catholic art student. I was the only one. For my diploma show in 1968, I included four chasubles. It was very unusual to have an interest in vestments. I did other things as well, but I chose to create the vestments knowing that it was an unlikely thing to do. And it was unusual in the Church to have printed vestments. At that time, after the Second Vatican Council, Church furnishers supplied either damask traditional vestments or machine appliqued modern vestments often with crude symbols of wheatsheaves, swirling flames, swirling water and doves, borrowed perhaps from Picasso, Braque or Matisse. The modern vestments were all really bad. It was no longer the symbolic whole which it was when it was damask. With damask it was colour and it was rich and it was a symbol itself. Whereas the modern vestments had all these symbols in little thin bits down the middle. They were bad art, and they just proliferated all over the place. So the priests were wearing viscose, which is cheap and easily rolled up, and washable and plain dull.

I didn’t want to start reproducing old vestments. I wanted to bring life back into what had become a tired, cliched modernity. As a child I responded to the theatricality of the Church: the rich colours of the vestments which changed with the liturgical seasons, each colour telling a story. The sacred sensed through light, colour, the smell of incense, music, silence. How difficult it is to convey the intangible, the inexplicable, the unseeable without the poetry of a long tradition! And the Christian tradition is a living tradition as opposed to a tradition that is merely in the comfort zone of our experience. As Christians we need to be unafraid of the new. Surely, we come from a secure place!

Henri Matisse

Henri Matisse’s chapel in Vence, France, finished in 1951, is a wonderful example of living tradition. Overwhelmingly powerful, overwhelmingly peaceful, he designed every detail including the vestments. He spent four years doing the total design of that church, everything in it. It is absolutely amazing. As far as I’m concerned it does absolutely continue in a tradition. He manages to make it both traditional and completely new and revelatory. I wanted do something, I suppose, a bit more like Matisse, who absolutely revolutionized liturgical vestments. As far as I know, there was nobody else doing vestments in 1950. His vestments were strong because he was a strong artist. He had the vision. I was trying to do something that was fresh using what skills I had. So really, that was what I wanted to do. I never expected anything I did to ever be worn. My aim has been to create something new and surprising which is also somehow restrained and timeless. To my mind art and religion are both on the same track.

Matisse uses structure and repetition, but he could also ad lib. I, without the superb artistry and skill of Matisse, am less able to ad lib! I need more of a structure. It’s got to have a sense of order. If it doesn’t have that, I feel that people are not going to be connected to the past tradition. I like to combine an element of mathematical symmetry in a way that echoes the traditional, with a new and personal insight to help me straddle the old and the new. Below are five examples:

Kintbury Cope, 1992

I made this in 1992 for the Anglican Church of St Mary in Kintbury. I knew that the Vicar at the time was expecting the typical symbol of an M with a crown on top. I wanted the whole garment to be the symbol, so I incorporated these motifs into the design. The ‘hood’ has a reference to the letter M in pink and blue. The repetition over the whole garment of the ermine shape refers to royalty. The fact that I inverted the shapes and made them pale grey was a reference to tears. I used the mainly blue and white Marian trompe l’oeil ribbon around the edge of the garment to complete the symbolism.

Julie Clague lectures in Catholic Theology at the University of Glasgow.