An edited version of this article was first published in the Catalogue

INTRODUCTION
ANDREA McLEAN - A Wheel of the Year
by
Morgan Falconer

Fourfold the Sons of Los in their divisions: and fourfold,
The great City of Golgonooza: fourfold toward the north
And toward the south fourfold, & fourfold toward the east and west

William Blake, Jerusalem

Blake conceived of Golgonooza as a place with a bustling, quotidian aspect like London, yet as a place in the process of becoming perfect like the Holy City itself. Indeed throughout, Golgonooza was a fusion of the human and the divine: in its substance, a translation of the beautifully arcane complexity of the plan for Solomon's Temple into the plan for a city; and in its name, a combination of Golgotha, the place of Christ's Crucifixion, with the primeval 'ooze' of existence. Such a city would be a refuge of light in the midst of dreadful darkness.

Golgonooza is one of the greatest of imagined cities, yet all symbolic cities depart from reality to imagine the place as something approaching an ideal. Throughout her residency at Gloucester Cathedral Andrea McLean's work has looked on the city with that translation in mind. For her, Gloucester can be a kind of Golgonooza, since both its history and her experience of it invites her to depict it as something primary. Growing up in the Forest of Dean, it was the first city she really experienced. The pattern of its streets, the way they make a cross at the centre of the town, became her image of the way a town is formed. As an artist McLean has developed an enduring investment in the art of the Middle Ages, so returning to the city to act as the chronicler of its cathedral also has a special aptness. Previously, she has revived Hieronymus Bosch in a distinctive, calligraphic abstraction, and she has taken the streets of modern London as an unlikely setting for new Blakean visions, and all the time she has criss-crossed between past and present in form, content and real experience. This is what has made her a perfect interpreter of Gloucester Cathedral throughout the passing year.

If you were to touch the plinth upon which the equestrian statue of King Charles II is placed, at Charing Cross, your fingers might rest upon the projecting fossils of sea lilies, starfish or sea urchins...

Peter Ackroyd, London: The Biography

There are several routes back into the past, but as Peter Ackroyd's lines suggest, it's not always the signposted ones that are the most interesting. When his fingers touch the monument, he doesn't think of affairs of state, but rather of the base matter of London's history, its 'ooze'. McLean's pictures approach the past in a similar fashion: they too dismiss any ordering schema, and they too immerse themselves in the past with abandon. All the conventional chronological assumptions of cause and effect, before and after, have been cast aside, and instead events and objects float free. As she says, her images show a world without gravity.

It is symptomatic of McLean's approach throughout the residency that the largest, most compendious picture she has produced suggests a system of chronology whilst also denying one. The Wheel of the Year is a vast, wilfully disordered memoir. It can be revolved, like certain earlier medieval maps, but with its mixture of images and abstract forms scattered evenly across its surface it lacks any means of dividing up time. Its method, however, is like that of a diary. The Wheel of the Year reflects aspects of the church's own chronological threads. Cloths and colours describe moments in the liturgical year, but across the larger dimensions of the Cathedral's history, the dates that are recorded only follow the more haphazard rhythm of commemoration, and layered over these monuments, another uneven chronology often appears in the form of deeply incised graffiti. It's this elaborate and complex chronology which lends so much enticing mystery to the building's fabric, yet it is also that which can make the building seem incomprehensible and defeating. To this, McLean's pictures bring a kind of coherence: she orders the chaos with a gentle hand.

Make me no maps, sir, my head is a map, a map of the whole world.

Henry Fielding

Map-making has the same kind of perverse charm as naming the clouds. Both have the kind of poetry that comes from translating the mute, natural world into the cultural. Andrea McLean's pictures have been compared to maps for similar reasons, and it is not to diminish them, but instead to recognise their imaginative power. They play at the borders of chronological systems, using them as a foil to suggest a kind of chaos. Yet to reduce her picture-making to the notion of cartography alone is to misrepresent the discipline's history as much as McLean's work. Her notions of charting and describing lead off in all manner of directions.

She first came upon the idea of map-making itself in a peculiar fashion. She was cycling into Rome, pedalling along in the heat and coming over a hill when the image of the city as a flat plan, a jumbled view from above, seemed obvious. Here was the Eternal City: the notion of a map as a description of its beauty and assertion of its power seemed a proper tribute. Her experience was also an uncanny echo of the history of early cartography, since the roots of topographical maps lie precisely in medieval images of Rome. These images were pictures and diagrams at once, images which sought to describe a place in detail, yet also like visions apprehended from a short distance outside the town. They were assertions of a city's strength and accomplishment, articulated by bold depictions of its encircling walls and the institutions that stood within.

The walls of McLean's city are less like fortifications than force-fields, energies which barely succeed in anchoring the elements they encompass. Beyond the walls the earth seems churned up by a sort of magic: it might be the disorder we read as enchantment in medieval art, or it might be the sort of energy that animated Chagall's pictures of Paris and Russia. McLean's pictures have this same kind of vividly enchanted realism. The passage from her etchings of Gloucester to her larger canvases, to The Wheel of the Year, is a step towards another important influence, the Hereford Mappa Mundi. The modern term for 'map' derives from the genre of late medieval charts of which Hereford is the last great survivor, yet originally the term Mappa Mundi meant a 'cloth of the world'. It was a parchment hung for edification and pleasure. Neither did the genre aspire to much cartographic accuracy: the charts were moral, theological, zoological schemes as much as they were records of the world as it stood. The dim conception their creators had of the world's geography also contributed to something more imaginative than imitative. Sometimes they divided the world into continents, but just as often they carved the world into a collection of climates or zones, with a great ocean river flowing through the centre.

McLean's pictures are also maps of a kind of world spirit. They are charts which take the Cathedral as a microcosm, an archetype for the world, and like the Mappa Mundi, they blend time as well as space into charming disorder. Areas of green and blue suggest foliage and water without being certain of their placement, and abstract shapes populate the surface of the canvas as dislodged echoes of the building itself. And instead of the edges of a circle suggesting the edges of the known world, in The Wheel of the Year it is an architectural motif, the quatrefoil, which is substituted. Hence, instead of a picture which aims to depict the whole world.

When Andrea McLean first arrived in Gloucester to begin the residency she started by examining the Cathedral like an artefact under the microscope. One doesn't usually expect to need magnification to see the ornament of a building so large, but in searching you do find treasures. Hence McLean found herself one morning, sat in the front row of the Lady Chapel examining the stained glass with a pair of binoculars. What she saw were fragments of earlier designs: glass from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, destroyed in parts and consolidated with fragments from the nineteenth. The pieces make up a confusing muddle of forms which still bear the signs of previous painted designs. Elsewhere in the Lady Chapel the fragmentation is repeated: a small expanse of terracotta tiling is comprised of tiles of various mismatched patterns; and covering the rest of the floor, old tomb-stones have been laid low to make flags, their inscriptions now worn away by the feet of visitors.

McLean's picture-making has a peculiar resonance with the Lady Chapel since it too is piled up from fragments. Her objects seem to hover in suspension, floating in an ether of painted veils, some fully visible, some too distant to recognise. The linear motif which often covers the surface of her canvases offers a suggestion of a powerful, slow flowing energy. It's a motif that derives from the famously complex ribbing which reaches up over the choir of Gloucester, but it's something that also echoes Klee's enchanted, sometimes trembling draughtsmanship. Stylistically it remains an echo of the architecture, the abbreviated, winding motion of the lines echoing its ordering ambition. It is harder to be certain what the lines suggest however, they might be the diabolical, destructive Chaos which amplifies the butterfly's wings; or else they might be the primeval life-force, Bergson's élan vital.

McLean's art might be abstract in its handling of form, but its connections to the world of objects and motifs suggests that it is almost allegorical as well. It is this which makes it a proper response to the medieval period. As Johan Huizinga acknowledged, the people of the Middle Ages looked on the natural world with a certain anxiety, since if every part of it had a simple function and no other significance at all, life too might have no significance. Either the world was God's work, or God was somehow present throughout it: otherwise there was no hope of salvation. McLean's pictures never seem so certain of God's place at the centre that they enthrone Him there, like Jerusalem in the Mappa Mundi, but by offering up so much of the physical world, and by loosing it from it anchors, she suggests that before, beyond or throughout the finite, there must be something infinite.

Morgan Falconer,
London, August 2002

View the Exhibition The Flower of All Cities

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