Acrylic on canvas
1.215 m x 0.6 m

Selected photos

Derek's talk from the Opening Night. Artists Talk About Their Work.
Wednesday 19 March 2008, 7:00-8:30pm, in the Gallery Space.


Facilitated by Sandra Atkins.

Sandra: Derek, can we move on to your piece? I know you wanted to share a few words with us.

Derek McCormack: This piece here is for the word “It is finished.” which in our version of the Seven [Last]Words from the Cross is the last thing Jesus says before he dies. So it’s sort of his death words.  And as I was doing it I recalled . . . I’ve done something in the Easter Art installation for five years. And I sort of get stuck on the same themes and the themes for me have been dereliction and abandonment, the dwelling place of God. The creative Word that became flesh, is at the time of the crucifixion in doubt, and so all words, all meaning, all identity are uncertain and slipping.  And in recent years I’ve been captured by the idea of cloths because the crucifixion account is littered with cloth.  There’s the purple robe Jesus was mocked and beaten in, there’s his clothes which are divided, and lots cast over them. Oh, I’m sorry, they’re not divided, lots are cast over them.  There’s his grave clothes and the shroud, and there’s the temple and the curtain over the holy of holies that splits and is torn.  For me the idea of cloth and the crucifixion adds up to Jesus corporeality, his humanity, possibly his divinity, hanging like a torn rag flapping in the wind. There’s some of the themes that I’ve come back to.
Last year I had a window, a forsaken window, a broken window from an abandoned house.  And I decided to continue with that theme, and this time I’ve got the window being blown in by wind and rain, and the elements coming in.  I return to my love of black and white words, and Latin. Although I restricted my Latin to the Roman numeral seven this time, [laughter] finding that in previous work no one new what the Latin meant anyway [laughter]. 
And this work is deliberately derivative. It looks a little bit like an old Colin McCahon, and the poem which I composed is a little bit similar in form to a William Carlos Williams poem ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’ . . . And the reason I decided to do that is because there is nothing novel in the adventure of death.  Death is a very old thing.  It is something we will all go through, and even this death of Jesus, its not a novel death, it’s a death that thousands of people in his day would have suffered.  And in the end the adventure of death for all of us is a lonely and dark experience that we go through.  So there’s nothing novel about it and so there’s nothing novel in this painting.
I’d just like to take the opportunity to talk about five things that are on it.  First of all I decided, rather cornily, to pick out the two prefixes that appear in the words, “dis” and “mal,” which of course are prefixes for ‘broken’ and ‘wrong.’  I’ve mentioned the Latin, there’s a ‘seven’ for the seventh word. At least on the Cityside website it’s the seventh word, and there’s a full stop after it. There’s a faint question mark because on those Catholic websites it’s the sixth word, and so its not necessarily the last word.  And I guess the events of Easter have that uncertainty, it’s finished but is it finished?  All of the words have become uncertain and even this one is.
The other thing I wanted to mention was this word ‘departing.’ And when I was young, the church that I went to always ended the evening service, after the benediction, by singing “God be in my head,” from the Book of Hours, which was a song composed in the fifteen hundreds, and it starts “God be in my head and in my understanding, God be in my mind and in my heart.” And you get to the finish of the song and “God be in my end and at my departing.”  The word ‘departing’ always reminds me of that song.  And I guess in Jesus’ death, the way we think about it and believe it, God is at our end and our departing. He is with us in our departing by dying here. Yeah, that’s about it. 

Sandra: Has it led you to any new beginnings or different views of ‘the finish’?

Derek: Different views of my ‘finish’? The ‘finish’?
[laughter]
Well, I don’t know, it just keeps on reminding me I guess that what I call the adventure of death, which appears to be the loneliest time in every human life, is actually the time when we are with God, because God has gone through the adventure as well.  And I do like this idea that I didn’t have before of Jesus as a torn rag flapping in the wind. 

Sandra:  I know that you’re a regular contributor to the art process here, and I wonder what you look for in your creating that might continue to be soul food to you through the rest of the year? Or you might not . . .

Derek: I look for something I can finish in the time available.
[laughter]

Sandra:  “It is finished”, so ‘finishing’ is good.

[From the floor]: The dove makes me think that the Holy Spirit came as a dove, and would there have been a sense that it didn’t really mean anything.  Was there a reason for the doves?

Derek: Well, the doves are birds, and I guess they’re -birds. But also they might be hope, they might be peace, they might be the disciples, they might be us, they might be the doves that poor people used to sacrifice at Passover at Jesus’ time they don’t need to anymore, they could be the Holy Spirit. I just thought of them first of all as birds but then just an image of something flying away. 

[From the floor]: I’ve got a question for you Derek, is it a fragment of a poem that you wrote, or is that the entire poem? 

Derek: It’s the entire thing. 

[From the floor]: Derek, as someone who also enjoys working with words, I love that the words are art, that there is art in how you have not only spoken the words, but in the drawn word.