The Art of Mortality

Prospect Court Mausoleum at Prospect Cemetery, Toronto, rcontains several hundred square feet of window that could have been filled by clear or frosted glass for a few hundred dollars. Instead, the cemetery's owner, Mount Pleasant Group, chose to spend more - a lot more - to commission stained glass artist Sarah Hall to fill the windows with original art (fig. 1). This initiative came not from a philanthropic sentimentalist but from an expert in marketing. Clearly, her market research told her something about serving people's emotional and spiritual needs that anyone interested in sacred, devotional or liturgical art ought to know.

Throughout human history, mortality and great art have gone hand in hand. Our earliest examples of Christian art, from primi- tive catacomb decorations to elaborate marble sarcophagi, are intimately associated with death. It is a curious fact (and from time to time in Christian history, a controversial one) that our experience of faith and spirituality is somehow enlarged by sensual stimulation. In order to appreciate The Word, we seem to need to look at The Pictures. "I think we need everything, not just pictures," explains Father Vito Marziliano, Pastor of Epiph- any of Our Lord parish in Toronto and a longtime friend and mentor to Sarah Hall. "We're human beings, and therefore the senses speak to us. Everything that is a source of beauty, a source of hope, a source of peace, is part of our prayer."

For Mount Pleasant Group, the challenge was perhaps of a more practical kind. The very fact that a private com- pany, necessarily concerned with its bottom line, is commissioning original art may surprise some. Companies that must survive in a competitive marketplace do so by filling a marketplace need effectively. Where that need is deeply personal and spiritual, as bereavement is, we need art - not mass-produced, sentimental kitsch, but the genuine article. "We're in business to make sure that people have a sense of meaning around death," explains Karen Hickey, vice- president of marketing at Mount Pleasant Group. "The facilities we provide must be consistent with what people need when faced with the death of a loved one. That means developing the kind of set- ting that will help them deal with grieving and remembering."

For Sarah Hall, a well-established artist with a formidable body of liturgical work behind her, creating work for a mausoleum presented unique challenges. Death may be an inspiring topic, but it is also a difficult one, and any chance that Hall may have had of remaining emotionally detached from this commission dissolved on her first visit to the site. "On one of the crypts," she remembers, "a note in a child's handwriting read, 'Happy Birth- day Papa. I hope everything is fine in Heaven. Say hello to Princess for me.'" There is no such thing as an "average" commission, but that child's note and the mixture of grief, memory, love and hope it implied inspired in Hall a profound and singular sense of respect and responsibility toward this job. She would need extraordinary sensitivity as well as a lot of soul-searching over what the appropriate artistic response to loss and grief ought to be. Her challenge would be to convey com- passion without lapsing into sentimentality, to provoke reflection not on the loss of life but on its meaning.

The subject chosen for the windows was the Stations of the Cross. Familiar to the largely Catholic community around Prospect Cemetery, the Stations is a venerable devotion that invites meditation on events surrounding Christ's passion, especially his walk through the streets of Jerusalem along what is now known as the Via Dolorosa. As Father Vito Marziliano explains: "The Stations of the Cross emerges from the desire to visit the places where Christ lived on Earth, especially those places that witnessed the end of his earthly journey, the places of his passion and resurrection." Since the Middle Ages, Jerusalem has been considered the most desirable pilgrimage destination in Christendom, but one which has remained inaccessible to many for reasons of practicality or safety. The Stations of the Cross evolved as a way to reflect upon the events surrounding Christ's last moments on earth while far from Jerusalem. According to Father Marziliano, the Stations is particularly well-suited to a mausoleum and helpful to people who are being forced by circumstance to reflect on mortality: "It's not just the end, it's also the beginning - because the Stations of the Cross includes the resurrection. A place of burial is not just a place to mourn and to remember but to anticipate. Therefore, it's the passageway; it helps the faithful realize that our journey on earth doesn't come immediately to an end with death."

Philosophically, this makes perfect sense, but to enable bereaved mourners to experience these ideas in a meaningful way is no simple matter. For abstract ideas to translate into experience, they need to be not only explained but enacted. Such enactment, if it is to be shared by a whole community, requires the sure touch of an accomplished artist.

For Sarah Hall, the response to this challenge began, as it often does for artists, with an exploration of some of her own most deeply felt experiences - in this case, an eight-month period spent in Jerusalem after she completed her apprenticeship. "I went back to the slides I'd taken in Jerusalem. There are wonderful, huge stone arches over the Via Dolorosa. There's some- thing very satisfying and tender and sheltering about that shape" (fig. 2). The other major influence was another comforting image Hall encountered while traveling: "I also looked at pictures I'd taken in Europe, which looked out into gardens. There are these lovely arches and gateways into the gardens. So the idea of bringing together the elements of the garden and the archway became a unifying element in every window."

Comfort and tenderness were what Hall wanted her windows to possess; what she found when she first inspected Prospect Mausoleum was a handsome, dignified architectural site of polished granite, with large, clear windows that allowed an aggressive penetration of the outside world into the private space of grieving and remembering (figs. 3, 4). The need for privacy and warmth was strikingly apparent, but so was the unique ability of stained glass to create the right ambiance. "Stained glass is always a filter for the outside world" (fig. I & cover), explains Hall. "Even when it's bad or insensitive, it is still a filter. You achieve a new interior, a new view of the world." Moreover, stained glass is a delicious feast of two of our most powerful visual experiences - light and color. Light has long been a metaphor not only for goodness but for God. Stained glass is inconceivable without light, and Hall's work manipulates it with masterly skill. Color is equally important. "Stained glass is about providing a certain kind of emotional environment for people," explains Hall. "Because it has color, it really creates an emotional resonance. Color takes you some- where whether you like it or not."

Figural decorations traditionally accompany the stations of the cross, often as sculptural elements that are actually touched by the faithful. This tactile experience is not easily duplicated by painted figures on glass. "My thinking was that because people like to touch the stations, sculpture would be much more satisfying than painted images on stained glass," explains Hall. She was also seeking an alternative to the portrait-like particularity of painted figures. "I felt that sculpture wouldn't have the specificity of a face painted in the stained glass. It doesn't become a character; it can become all of us. There was something more universal about the story, the characters and the narrative than I could do through painted faces." Her solution was to commission sculptor Joseph Stanek to create the beautiful small bronze figures that enhance each window (fig. 5). "There's a wonderful tenderness in his work, which is why I wanted to work with him. The sculptures are a beautiful, human element."

Visiting Sarah Hall's 14 windows now installed at Prospect Mausoleum is like walking through a series of related but distinct landscapes. In each case, a comforting, enclosing arch rises above a cradling, abstracted landscape. Graphically similar to one another, the windows' colors take us on a remarkable pilgrimage of the spirit, from the coolness of "Exhausted" (fig. 6) to the strident energy of "They Stripped Him" (fig. 7) to the graphic and spiritual consummation of "Into Thy Hands" (fig. 8). Joseph Stanek's bronze sculptures provide a gentle, humane invitation to the brilliant landscapes of light that lie beyond and to the mysterious but dazzlingly attractive world that lies through the archway. The windows are comforting, certainly, but go beyond commiseration to be a powerful affirmation of life and eternity in the face of temporal loss. "I believe that stepping into another world is going to be a positive thing," says Hall. "I've tried to create the possibility for people to move outside their own grief and experience it a little more universally. The windows aren't intended to divert them from grief. They present the possibility of another world-the heavenly Jerusalem." ML

Peter Coffman is an architectural historian, writer and photographer living in Toronto.