This tapestry was created to explore the beautiful Jewish idea of "tikkun olam" – to repair the world.
The overall idea of the design comes from Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem God's Grandeur, and especially the last two lines:
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
The cruciform lower central panel is made of raised stitching with a precisely stitched cross-beam in dull colours, picking up Hopkins' vision of a world in which "all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil…" Above the industrialised stitching, the suggestion of a stained glass window, with the much slighter cruciform shape with arms up-reaching.
Like most of my designs, this one was worked out on the canvas, in the doing. It took around 3 months from bare canvas to completion. I'm posting it today because its central message of hopeful realism and hopeful imagination is the core and content of our prayers – that God will help us to heal the world through peaceful persistence, intentional reconciliation, generous kindness, and love that doesn't take hate for an answer.
Here is Hopkin's astonishingly evocative poem:
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
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