My Blue Heaven

My Blue Heaven, The Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, May 2019

The artist John Christie recently completed a new project – a hut built from century-old corrugated iron- now fashioned into a major artwork and currently on show at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in Norwich. After seeing some of the photographs and related pieces at the North House Gallery in Manningtree with Christie recently, he asked if I would be interested in writing a short introduction to the catalogue he has just produced. I was more than happy to do so; it is enchanting. The combined works share the title My Blue Heaven.

The main piece is the hut, the structure of which informs all the other pieces. After construction it was sawn in two, mounted on legs, and lit from within by blue LED lights. Instead of concentrating on the form’s powerful and dark interiority – the usual stuff of hut dreams and forebodings (think of Derek Mahon’s unsettling narrative poem, A Disused Shed in Co.Wexford) – Christie has opened his hut up to the starry skies above.

In this work, and the related acrylic paintings, he evokes the social history and emotional resonance of corrugated iron itself. Primarily a cheap building material, it was developed in the first half of the nineteenth century, soon becoming closely identified with the fervent religious revival which swept Victorian Britain and the rapidly expanding membership of proselytising sects such as the Primitive Methodists, the Independent Baptists and the Wesleyans. These were particularly strong in nonconformist East Anglia, where the chapels still hold their own in the landscape.

The easy prefabrication, assembly and portability of the ‘tin tabernacles’ also caused them to be known as ‘mission’ churches or even ‘gypsy’ churches (just one architectural step up from ‘tent religion’). In his definitive history and gazetteer, Tin Tabernacles, enthusiast Ian Smith asserted that ‘Iron churches were the perfect synthesis of industrial ability and social and spiritual need.’ Flat-packed sheets of corrugated iron, together with pre-cut lengths of timber framing could be delivered almost anywhere in the country at short notice and at little cost.

Puritanical, plain, and lacking all material splendour or decorative excess, the galvanized tin chapels were nevertheless high on spiritual and devotional meaning. They have also become an object of fascination, if not desire, for many artists, though Christie’s hut eschews sentimentality in its pictorial representation, if not in its lyrical associations.

New Constellation (detail) May 2018

My Blue Heaven evokes forms of transcendental longing. Once the shed had been severed in two, he realized that a song that had been going round in his head for some time – New Orleans pianist Fats Domino’s upbeat version of My Blue Heaven – unlocked a series of correspondences between this elemental tin shed and dreams of worlds lost and perhaps still to come. This imaginative projection is further developed in the gallery work, ‘New Constellation’, a combination of treated corrugated iron, acrylic paint and panels of LED lights, which ‘discovers’ the essential hut form as a familiar constellation in the night sky, an example of what philosopher Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space defined as ‘transcendental geometry’.

The essentialism of the hut rests on its archetypal architectural symmetry. Just as the Acropolis has columns, entablature and pedimented roof, so Christie’s deconstructed iron shed has its uprights, cross-pieces (lintels) and roof diagonals. It is an ideal form in the Platonic sense, and Christie’s brilliant axiometric conceit of finding the cheap tin shed forming its own constellation in the distant heavens, provides this common or garden structure of everyday use with an elemental presence in the world, beautifully so.

Ken Worpole

My Blue Heaven is currently on show at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, University of East Anglia, from 10 May to 1 September 2019 as part of the Norfolk and Norwich Festival. For further information: https://scva.ac.uk/art-and-artists/exhibitions/john-christie-my-blue-heaven

An illustrated catalogue of the works included in My Blue Heaven, with an introductory essay by Ken, ‘Hut Symmetries’, can be purchased at £6 (including p&p) from John Christie directly. More details: christie.phb@gmail.com

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