Martin Dull: Worship & Tribute

“That is what deconstruction is made of: not the mixture but the tension between memory, fidelity, the preservation of something that has been given to us, and, at the same time, heterogeneity, something absolutely new, and a break.” - Jacques Derrida

By deconstructing familiar Christian tropes such as the cruciform and the body, Worship and Tribute establishes a humanistic command of form and abstraction. Scale becomes the relative factor – the viewer can’t help but supplant the anthropomorphic into the sculptures or the atmospheric into the paintings. Through these allusions, I intend to evoke a sense of personhood and place where no objective personhood or place are present. This opens the imagination to a myriad of associations; most prevalently, that of Western spaces of worship. It is my belief that our propensity for associating space and object with the transcendental and metaphysical is one of the most basic human experiences.

My practice revolves around an interest in the intangible. Back in 2016, while studying abroad, I became enamoured with Quattrocento predella panels by Pre-High Renaissance masters such as Uccello and Duccio. Their stylized line and evocative color, observant yet transcendent of the naturalistic style of the High Renaissance, became deeply moving and fundamentally exciting. Over time, it became clear that many of the artworks I was admiring were conceived as parts of a cohesive space, considered alongside sculpture and architecture.

I began applying this concept to my contemporary practice ~ deconstructing the Western Roman Catholic tradition and using those investigations to engage spaces holistically. The rich, fraught, and often misunderstood history of abstraction and image-making become a world in which I can dissent. It allows a place to supplant new ideas that challenge and, perhaps, even influence how we see, associate, or feel. It becomes a metaphor for something as singular as the self, as intimate as flesh, and as expansive as the universe. Instead of a means to an end, the work becomes a doorway.