Meditation for Lent

Andrew Lambirth on Charlie Millar’s pavement of resin casts in Canterbury Cathedral

For Lent, the artist Charlie Millar (born 1965) has installed a pavement of 308 resin casts, like transparent bricks, arranged in a rectangle on the floor of the Eastern Crypt of Canterbury Cathedral. Millar casts these bricks himself, embedding within them an eclectic mix of objects. Each in itself is an individual work of art, but combined they make an image-rich meditation for Lent, a series of tableaux which are infinitely suggestive, and throw the viewer back upon his or her own resources and responses, in a quest for meaning. By focusing upon the detail of such unconsidered trifles as riverbed detritus, builders’ rubble or ordinary dust, Millar opens the way for speculation of a larger, more spiritual order. The Dean of Canterbury and all those responsible for this original and rewarding commission are to be highly praised for the initiative.

A good place for a pilgrimage, Canterbury. But Chaucer’s pilgrims set out from Southwark’s Tabard Inn in April, ‘when the sweet showers fall’, not in the last wintry days of February when I wended my way to London Bridge. Thence by train through the desolate suburbs of south-east London, out past the dormitories of Orpington and Sevenoaks, through the pillared Martian emptiness of Ashford so-called International, to the unmanned halt at Canterbury West. By foot from there, on the approach to West Gate and then into the rather tawdry pedestrianised shopping precinct that was once a main street. The cathedral is at no point visible above or beside the enclosing shops and offices. Then you glimpse it down a side street, turn in through Christ Church Gate (where you will be asked for an admission fee) and confront the building — large, but by no means at once awe-inspiring.