How art can be received: the story of Margaret

Many people find the language of art 'another country'. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, or a bar to communication: by looking at someone else's vision of the world, our own beliefs are engaged and challenged. Ideas that are comfortable and familiar may find themselves at odds with what is being offered in the art. This very challenge opens up a relationship between us as viewers and the art we look at. It gives us the opportunity to examine ourselves in the light of something outside of ourselves.

There's mistrust in many people towards contemporary art. Strangely, of course, there always has been. Impressionist paintings were considered so radical and offensive when they were first exhibited that they had to be hung beyond the reach of sharpened umbrellas brought into the Salons by outraged Parisians in an attempt to destroy them. Now, Impressionism has become probably the most favoured and acceptable art movement of the past 150 years.

Now, I wouldn't claim that my work is radical or challenging in those ways that could be described as truly 'cutting edge'. And yet, I have seen how certain pieces of my own have succeeded in communicating something significant in others.

I'd like to tell you about Margaret, a woman I first met at the private view of one of my exhibitions. The piece I've already mentioned, 'Consolation of Tears', was on show for the first time. Margaret was invited to the private view by a mutual friend. She'd lived in Rwanda for over thirty years, where she'd worked as an educator. When the genocide began in 1994, she was trapped in her home for four days, but saw and heard the horror of what was going on around her. Many of her close friends and colleagues were murdered, countless others fled the country, separated from family and friends. A lucky accident enabled Margaret to be evacuated by the UN, bringing her by a circuitous route back to the UK.

She's spoken eloquently about her sense of personal loss, bewilderment and shock at the time. She continues to feel unable to comprehend why some for whom she prayed were delivered, whilst others were murdered.

At the private view, she found herself drawn to 'Consolation of Tears', which she's kindly loaned for this evening. She immediately responded to the work which, in her own words, 'helped to bring back colour and to renew hope in darkness and uncertainty'. She saw in the image, she says, 'Christ's crown of thorns and his suffering, identifying with me, and with thousands of others in their loss of identity'.

It wasn't actually my intention to represent a crown of thorns. That's an element of the Christian story that Margaret brought to the picture and projected onto it. I don't mind this. In fact, I welcome it. At a deeper level, though, something of my original vision had communicated through the picture. I'd intended to paint a vision of hope in, and beyond, suffering. So perhaps when Margaret talks about seeing 'Christ's crown of thorns and his suffering' she herself is using a metaphor to express this vision of transcendent hope coming out of real loss.

As she says, 'Although the thorns are there, there is a calm centre of hope, peace and completion, reaffirming that I am whole in Christ.'

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