Architecture of Continual Passion

Opening Speech by Liam Nolan

In my life there have been only two occasions on which I came across a man doing his work inside a cathedral. One of those two men is here this evening. So let me get the other one out of the way first. I came across him when I was a teenager, and the cathedral was St Colman's in Cobh, the town in which I was born and where I grew up. The man was repairing and restoring the church's great pipe organ, and I had nipped in to say a few prayers for help in an exam I was sitting the following day. I couldn't see the man, and he couldn't see me, but my concentration was continually interrupted by the bangs and hammerings, the hisses and random notes coming from the organ loft.

I was halfway through the ten Memorare's I had set myself to say, and was on the point of abandoning the effort, when there was one final thump, a clatter, and then silence. "Thanks be to the good God!" I thought, and was about to start praying again when there was a majestic arpeggio from the organ, the king of instruments. Fully expecting to hear a burst of something like Bach's "Toccata and Fugue", which I thought would be splendid, and might repair my fractured spirituality, and raise my hopes for the outcome of my feeble intellectual labours, I put my head in my hands and waited.

And then, music from that great organ filled the church. But, it wasn't music by Bach, or Brahms; or Mendelssohn or Liszt or Caesar Franck, or by any of the great classical composers, that the unseen man in the organ loft launched into, but "Blind Lemon" Jefferson's "Long Tall Mama"... followed by Louis Armstrong's "I'm a Ding Dong Daddy" and ending up with Johnny Dodds's "Gut Bucket Blues"!

I nearly freaked out. And I was overwhelmed by thoughts of sacrilege, and the likelihood of an English Protestant organist being suddenly struck dead in St Colman's Cathedral, Cobh.

Well, how was Ito know that those two blues numbers and the snatch of New Orleans jan, were the ideal pieces to test every finger-key, every stop, every manual and every foot pedal on the organ? How do I know it now? Because callow and inquisitive youth that I was, I waited for the man and asked him, and it was he who put names to the things he'd played.

The second, and only other, man I came across at work in a cathedral was in St Brendan's Cathedral in Loughrea a little over a year ago - is the man whose exhibition of new sculpture you see around you tonight - Thomas Glendon. He was up on a scaffolding high above the floor carving a capital on a column next to the high altar. He had some type of hammer in one hand, some type of chisel in the other. The sounds of the hammer hitting the chisel echoed in the otherwise silent church.

I watched him for a few minutes from down near the door, and I kept thinking about the loneliness of his work, and kept hoping that he wouldn'tlose concentration, or that the chisel wouldn't slip, causing him to make a mistake and knock out a chunk of stone he wasn't meant to and didn't intend. After all, the 18-foot block of marble from which Michelangelo carved one of the world's greatest statues - the muscular and beautiful "David" - had been put aside (the block of marble, that is)... put aside as useless after, we are told, being mutilated by other sculptors.

I suppose I was just hoping that the sculptor up there above the floor in St Brendan's wouldn't accidentally mutilate the stone of the capital through wavering concentration. And as I sat in my car in the church yard about ten minutes later, a few things I had recently read came back to me. One was an observation by Andre Gide, the French novelist, who said that art was a collaboration between God and the artist, "and the less the artist does, the better."

I could still faintly hear Tom Glendon tap-tapping away with his hammer and chisel in the church, and it occurred to me that if he adhered to Gide's theory, and acted it out to its logical conclusion, and did noThing, but let God do it all, he was one sculptor who would never earn a crust.

In that marvellous way that the human mind has, mine jumped to other related thoughts. There was that Basque proverb which said, "God is a busy worker - but he loves help." O.K., so Tom was helping the Almighty in there in St Brendan's. I could hear him! And he was right in line with the advice in the Spanish proverb that says simply, "Pray to God, but hammer away." So I drove off, leaving Tom Glendon hammering away, and presumably helping God.

When I read his Stephen Spender quotation on the Invitation to tonight's event, I was struck by the coincidence of the appearance in Spender's lines of the words "cathedrals", and "columns"... and, yes, "music". But then again, there is that chaining definition of what a coincidence is - just one more miracle, but one in which the Almighty chooses to remain anonymous.

When Tom Glendon came to my home to ask me if I would open this exhibition, I found him to be gentle, arliculate, and modest. Over the course of several meetings, I learned that he had had a reluctance to talk about what motivated him, what kept him going, what drove him, what his philosophy was. But I kept on questioning him, because I wanted to know true things. And because I believe in the Chinese saying: "Fall seven times, get up eight."

Tom would stand there, his eyes far away, as he sought the words to formulate true answers. I privately wondered if he subscribed to Picasso's querulous view, the one that surfaced when the painter said, "Everyone wants to understand art..." (I might add that if Picasso had said that to me, I'd have replied, "Why not? What's wrong with that?" But he didn't, so I didn't get a chance to say it to him).

However, to return to the whole of what Pablo said on that occasion: "Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the song of a bird? Why does one love the night, flowers, everything around one, without trying to understand them?" I found myself wondering if embedded in that was part of Tom Glendon's reactions to my questions. Or maybe he agreed with Henry Moore's belief that it was/is a mistake for a sculptor to speak very often about his job, because, Moore said, "it releases tension needed for his work."

Anyway, Tom Glendon was patient, and on a freezing day in a former schoolroom on a narrow country road, and with just a few burned-through twigs greying into embers in the grate, he showed me some work in progress. He explained things, and my small store of knowledge expanded as I came face-to-face with examples of his carving, modelling, casting and construction.

He spoke of the many types of chisels and hammers that a carver uses, and the other evening in our home, he mimicked the arm action of the way one particular chisel has to be used to get the proper result. He has talked to me with quiet passion about ideas he has had, and how he came by some of them - for example walking by the lake and watching waves breaking on the shore; he spoke to me about space and form.

He talked about modelling in wax, and what takes place in the foundry, and how stone weathers in the outdoors. And from all of it, I got a better and informed understanding of such formerly (to me) mysterious things as the reproduction technique, duplicating the form of an original. Most of all I got an appreciation of his craft and his art.

I mentioned the word "passion", and you'll notice that he has called this exhibition: "The architecture of continual passion" - words he borrowed from Spender's lines. Well, Hegel said that nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without passion. This exhibition I believe, once again proves Hegel's assertion. I marvel at sculptors' skill in shaping their conceptions. They have been doing it for as long as human beings have inhabited the earth. Why? Because it is a wondrous means of human expression.

Down all the long millennia, sculpture has continued to change as sculptors continued to search for, and find, new directions and new inspirations. They inspire us. They also sometimes puzzle us with their titles. A look at the list of names of the works on exhibition here may give you an inkling of what I'm getting at. But then again, wasn't it Henry Moore who said that giving a sculpture too simple a title takes away part of its mystery, so that the spectator moves on to the next subject, making no effort to ponder the meaning of what he has just seen. That's as may be, but I look at the marble "Anterior Head", and the stone seems alive. I look at "Linked Torsos", and in the smooth organic forms I see beauty of expression, full of vitality and depth, and a certain but lovely mystery.

It would be interesting to ask in a year's time where these pieces here tonight eventually ended up. In private collections? Bought by companies and corporations? I hope so. Remember what Ruskin said, "Life without industry is guilt, and industry without art is brutality." When Tom Glendon said to me a couple of months back, "Some of the pieces will be semi-abstract human figures", I thought he meant it as a gentle warning. If he did, there was no need, because I know that he's no Damien Hurst or Tracy Emin. Anyway, the artist doesn't always necessarily see things as they are, but as he is.

This is how Thomas Glendon is, and it gives me considerable pleasure now to declare his exhibition open.

Liam Nolan, April 29th 2005