By John O’Loughlin

It never occurred to me that I might be revolutionary, in my thoughts or actions. In fact, looking back on my youth, I consider myself as being rather naïve, an observer, reporter, reviewer.

I was the young altar boy who readily accepted the suggestion that he might become a priest. Who, at the age of 12 years, went off from a small country town in South Australia to a boarding school in Adelaide to learn Latin as preparation for seminary studies. There was never a question about belief in the theological principals of the Catholic faith—that was a given. After eight years, however, I doubted my ability to fulfill the vocation of the priesthood, a lonely, celibate life, and decided to leave the seminary a year or so before ordination would have taken place.

I moved to Melbourne in the state of Victoria, found employment, got married, and lived as an active Catholic parishioner in different towns according to work needs, always confident in my faith. I even acted as a lay minister when the number of ordained priests declined over the years.

In 1980, I began the practice of pottery, a practice that has developed ever since. I quickly fell in love with clay, as one does, and continued on with this art form. My last work posting (with the Federal Department of Employment) was to Ballarat, a historical gold town, where the mining highlighted the good clays available, so many potters worked there. I advanced my skills on a part-time study basis until I was able to retire at the age of 56 and attend the University Arts Academy full time as a late-life student of visual arts specialising in ceramics. By the time I had finished an honors year, then gone on to a Master of Arts and a year as an artist in residence, my years of art training matched my time in the seminary.

Through the study of writers and artists, I learned about the possibility of transforming a one-dimensional idea into its three-dimensional expression. This was revelation to me. Writers such as Sister Rosemary Crumlin in her exhibition guidebook “Beyond Belief-Art and the Religious Imagination” and Simon Shama in “Landscape and Memory” echo my own attitude to the creation of art. Historical research involves digging down from the familiar through many layers, reaching new understandings, and then coming back to our own reality and reframing our perceptions. Our religious art-making is very individual and uses personal symbols that are unique to the individual artists’ experience of life. As artists, we seek to question rather than to present definite ideas. We use familiar iconographies and juxtapose symbols that are often incongruous and anomalous, but which become very expressive.

Artists like Adrian Saxe helped me see a way to express ideas in clay, to transform a particular idea into three-dimensional symbolism. For example, the gourd form became a symbol for the human body (both a woman and a man). A new and exciting experience was the discovery of ‘dialogue’ with my artworks, a process that occurred, or was revealed, quite suddenly, during the production of work in my Masters studies. The back-and-forth ‘discussion’ with a new piece of artwork was both real and amazing, and has become natural and continuous as part of my art-making to this day.

During the making process, the dialogue is ongoing, helping one to evaluate form, indicating when the piece needs adding to or subtracting from, a little line of clay to finish the appearance of a lid or the like. A finished piece like the “Closed Reliquary with Three Crosses”, the first of the closed or un-lidded vessels that I made, was observed with satisfaction, even excitement, as it sat on the studio bench. The dialogue was in the form of the realisation that this vessel does represent something mysterious, perhaps even eternal, in that one could never know what might (fancifully) be inside the reliquary. The patina of the piece communicates a sense of age, of the “digging down” through history, of being there when the saint’s bones were laid in the vessel.

The real revolution, though, was the dramatic shift in my religious understanding through this time of study. My wife and I had stopped attending Mass as we felt we were not really engaging with the meaning of the ritual any longer. I was experiencing growing anger at, and disillusionment with, the church, including the clergy sexual-abuse issues, very prominent in Ballarat, both in previous years and at this time.

I have many friends from my student days who are exemplary priests who have adopted celibacy as a way of life. The pedophile priest is a criminal affront to the efforts of these men, and has altered their lives and relationships with their young and mature parishioners. When our own parish priest left suddenly, I collected money for him around the parish and passed it on to help him in his “recovery”, never realising that he was, as it later turned out, a pedophile priest. For my wife and I there was an escalation in our anger and disillusionment that led us to cease practicing our religion.

My outlook on art was transforming as well. An important beginning point was to solve the problem of how to produce surface treatments on the clay that exuded the baroque style or a feel for over-decoration that was evident in most reliquary forms that I have seen. The solution was to visit churches and cemeteries and to mould with clay the marble carvings on headstones and in church art, and to take impressions from wrought iron in graveyards. I amassed a great array of moulds and have used them repeatedly in the works.

I began to delve into the question of the fine line between faith and superstition through a study of the belief in miracles. I had always believed in the possibility of supernatural intervention in worldly affairs and in the veracity of the stories of miracles performed by God directly, or through the intervention of a saint, or indeed daily through the priest when, during the Catholic Mass, he ‘transubstantiates’ the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. I know that millions before have called this pure superstition, that wars have been fought over the belief, but for me it was the Catholic faith which I believed. Until my research and my thinking brought about a quite sudden change in belief.

I realise now that this had been brewing for some time, the questioning of the reality versus the statements of doctrine that I heard and knew. I reflected on the enormous faith called for by the church in expecting its faithful to accept that a miracle occurs at every Mass. Throughout the world, people must believe that when the priest says “..this is my body…this is my blood” the bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ. As Catholics we accepted this as part and parcel of “our faith”. Perhaps it doesn’t bear too much thinking about.

The questioning of the veracity of belief in miracles raises so many other issues. Life and death issues. For the Catholic, saints exist in an after-life and occasionally ‘visit’ a human through a vision. The Nicene Creed is recited by the congregation at every Catholic Mass, saying “I believe in … the resurrection of the dead and life everlasting.” My making of reliquaries, chests for the storage or display of remnants of saints’ bodies or clothing, became the medium for expression in my ‘Church and Faith’ series. I gained much inspiration for this from my visits to Italy, where I visited family and travelled. There were so many types of elaborately crafted and decorated vessels displayed in the churches and museums that I visited, often used in processions on feast days. I admired the beauty of the reliquaries, but the macabre and superstitious nature of this form of celebration and belief chewed away at my own beliefs like a dissolving solution.

I was not becoming an evangelising atheist but a quiet revolutionary, which is why I titled my thesis ‘Vessels for Miracles: a tangible expression of an unwillingness to disallow belief.’ I was, however, at last, allowing myself to disbelieve.

I read a book by an Anglican bishop in which he said that he no longer believed in the resurrection of Jesus, the fundamental belief of Christianity, but that change of heart hasn’t altered his faith or his following of Jesus. When I read this I was shocked. Was it possible to deny the resurrection and still be a good person? The framework of my study and my beliefs changed from that time. On reflection this ‘dialogue with the artwork’ was a very intimate experience of the mind, a spiritual connection, like my love for my wife. I realise now that I had not felt this same connection in my relationship with God or the saints. My beliefs were my faith, academic connections rather than real and personal ones.

Now I see religion as a construct of man, an artifice to help mankind understand and manage the mysteries of life and death. My connection with my art, and with art in general, has taken the place in my head that at one time was occupied by my faith. The activities of a life of Catholicism are many and varied and there is a gap left when one opts out of that way of life, especially the dimension of community. I fill that gap with continuing friendships and an active life around family and, of course, my art.