From “The Space Between” at Limerick City Gallery.

The Path of The Pilgrim
by Caoimhin Mac Giolla Leith

On July 27th Chris Doris climbed to the summit ofCroagh Patrick. There he spent forty days and forty nights enduring the hardships of an inclement environment in contemplative isolation from both the comforts and demands of everyday life.
Although the physical severity of the place precluded the possibility of sustained meditation, this withdrawal nevertheless offered the promise of some time and space
for reflection. The precise length of his stay had an unavoidable resonance within the tradition of Christian spiritual retreat that goes back well beyond St. Patrick's legendary sojourn on the Reek. His action was also more generally an act of remembrance and tribute to what Doris refers to as 'all those individuals from other mystical traditions who have sought to transform themselves and the community through "spiritual practice". For in spite of his removal from society Doris met and interacted on a daily
basis with a multitude of other people. These were the host of visitors who, for their various personal reasons, also chose to detach themselves temporarily from ordinary life, many of them in the hope of spiritual, psychological or physical renewal or transformation. Doris" extended vigil was an
art-work sponsored by Mayo County Council who had previously appointed him as artist-in-residence. On the evidence of the substantial and immediate local support and
the national media coverage alone, seldom has a publicly commissioned art-work so effectively captured the attention of the broader community for whom it was intended. It was important for Doris as an artist that his presence on the mnuniiiin be both protracted and unembellished by any
superfluous symbolism or extranaeous unnecessarily distracting activity. A fundamental paradox of this piece of cleanly conceived "social sculpture ' was that an action which replicated the extremes of early Christian ascetic withdrawal from community at the same time brought the artist into close contact with thousands of pilgrims.

This bond between the individual and the collective is crucially important to Doris, who is best known as a painter. He has over the years been unusually successful in insinuating the fruits of that typically private pursuit into the public domain. As early as 1986, before he ever exhibited his work in the formal setting of an art gallery, Doris caught the attention of the Dublin citizenry by posting a series of 800 hand-painted heads on various public sites throughout the
city. On that occasion the artist's avowed purpose in exposing the public to these fierce depiction of seemingly tormented souls was to make "an assertion of physical pain in the context of the street, (and in the context) of advertising's denial of pain and insistence on happiness.' These days his views of the power of painting is not so much a matter of bending the resources of expressionist
figuration to the purpose of strident social protest. What is most radical and liberating about the actual process of painting in Doris" current view of his vocation is that it
establishes an ideal context in which it is possible to be "fully present". The words 'presence', "connectedness" and "interdependence" crop up again and again in his rumination on his life and work, both as an artist and as a practitioner and preceptor of the Sahaj Marg system of spiritual training. Sahaj Marg, which may be translated as 'Natural Path" or
'Simple Way", is usually presented as a refinement of Raja Yoga, and has been described as "a practical method designed to give, the direct experience of realisation, right
here, right now, in the midst of our daily situations'. As an artist his conviction is that the constant striving after 'real presence' in the privacy of his studio practice will, through
the power of personal transformation, ultimately have an equally transformative effect on the collectivity of which he is an inalienable part. This conviction is perfectly reflected both in his action on Croagh Patrick and in the tangible results of his sojourn there.
The latter include, most importantly, a 'visitors book' containing the signatures of several thousand pilgrims who made the ascent to the summit of the mountain during the course of artist's stay there, and a suite of paintings on paper which Doris refers to as 'The Pilgrim Series'. These works are complementary in that they both present the
viewer with traces of a procession of individuals: traces which, in their very different ways, also reflect the physical
contexts in which the artist encountered these individuals.
^ signature is of course, under ideal conditions, a unique and invariable index of the presence at some point in the past of the a given surface. It is conventionally assumed that a signature can also be an oblique indicator of personality. What Doris found is that certain physical circumstances, in
particular the ever-changing weather conditions on the summit of Croagh Patrick, seem also to affect in a more general manner the way people signed their names. His six-
week log thus turned out to be not merely a record of a stream of discrete individuals but the story of the interaction of groups of people under a common sky, the nature of their otherwise unique marks changing collectively depending on whether they happened to sign in rain-beaten or wind-blown haste or at their leisure under a benignly beaming sun.
In a similar manner the suite of works on paper represents both a response to the artist's encounters with a number of
individual pilgrims and a reflection of certain elements common to their shared pilgrimage. In conversation Doris speaks warmly of various specific encounters: with a Navajo
mystic who likened the Reek pilgrimage to Native American spiritual quests for enlightenment through withdrawal of their sacred mountains, with two' returned missionaries from Kenya who discussed with the artist various African parallels to his retreat, and with an assortment of spiritual
pilgrims, tourists and local athletes. All of these were memorable for different reasons. As well as producing an amount of photographic documentation of the immediate environment of Croagh Patrick Doris made a series of photographic portraits of individual pilgrims. In conversation he specific person who made his or her mark on also refers to each of the graphic works in the 'Pilgrim Series' by name in a way that clearly indicates the specific person whose
'portrait' they are in essence, e.g. The Navajo Pilgrim", 'The Sufi Pilgrim' and so forth. Yet he has chosen in the end not to title these works, not to designate them publicly in this
way. For to do so might be to block unnecessarily too many other interpretative paths available to the attentive and open-minded viewer of these works. For they are, after all, works which have been abstracted considerably from the specific encounters that inspired them. This decision also
facilitates a recognition on the viewer's part of the fundamental link between the particular and the universal, the private and the public, the individual and the communal
which, as already noted, is an enduring concern in Doris' artistic and spiritual practice.
While all of the graphic works are unique they are all painted on sheets of paper that measure eighty inches by thirty inches. Most are executed in Indian ink, though some of
them are made in water-colour and pastel. They all share a common format of two thick vertical lines, placed at some distance from each other and from the sides of the paper,
which run from the top to the bottom of a painting surface that is otherwise left blank.
These lines vary considerably, especially as to colour, surface texture and the presence or absence of various superimposed quasi-calligraphic marks. Yet their fundamental compositional structure recalls the basic
Structure of the Croagh Patrick pilgrimage, the endless pattern of ascent and descent.
Or, more precisely, the recurrent pattern of ascent and decent as perceived from a vantage point which we might imagine as in some way outside or above or beyond the
wearying exigencies and practical details of the individual Journey. These graphic works also reflect the constant diiingrs of weather and light throughout the period during
which they were produced. The general sense of airiness, openness and calm which they exude would appear to confirm Doris' revised perception of the Reek at the end his time there. His initial concern that the summit would be 'a dour and penitential place" turned out to be unfounded. It was, rather, as he puts it, "a light and joyful place" where
ordinary people felt a sense of genuine accomplishment having made the relatively arduous ascent, and where the palpable sense of general release suggested that a certain
amount of emotional and psychological baggage had been shed along the way and along the pilgrims' more manifestly physical encumbrances. Chris Doris' patient and committed planning and execution of his "sculptural action' and the elaboration of its various subsequent manifestations combine to offer us a view of one way in which the artist's dream of the radical transformation of community through individual spiritual transformation might indeed become a reality.

Caomhin Mac Giolla Leith