Whereas in our present age it’s common for families to take down their Christmas decorations on Twelfth Night (January 5) or Epiphany (January 6)—and many American Christians do so even sooner—in medieval Europe they typically stayed up through Candlemas on February 2, or were removed the evening before. Yes, Christmas was celebrated for forty days in the Middle Ages! Why that span? Because forty days after his birth, the infant Christ was presented in the temple according to Jewish custom and inspired the famous song of Simeon about finally getting to see God’s salvation and glory. The feast of Candlemas commemorates this event each year, which many medieval worshipping communities regarded as the bookend of the Christmas season.
In her book Winters in the World: A Journey through the Anglo-Saxon Year, Eleanor Parker notes that Candlemas is the last feast of winter and the first feast of spring—a transitional festival that looks back to Christmas and forward to Easter (86). The date coincides with a significant point in the solar year: midway between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. Read more in an UnHerd article by Parker, “Light a candle; spring is coming.”
So as we celebrate Candlemas this Friday, we bid farewell to Christmas and prepare to welcome Lent. The Chorus of Westerly models a respectful send-off in a video they released in January 2021, combining a choral performance of the “Candlemas Eve Carol” with a recitation by James Lawson of “Now Have Good Day”—both texts from early modern England.
The text of the first carol, originally published with the title “Ceremonies for Candlemasse Eve,” is by the poet-priest Robert Herrick (1591–1674), and the tune is traditional, collected from an old church gallery book; the two appear together in The English Carol Book (Second Series) (1923), edited by Martin Shaw and Percy Dearmer. The Chorus of Westerly sings the first two stanzas and refrain:
Down with the rosemary and bays, Down with the mistletoe; Instead of holly, now upraise The greener box (for show).
The holly hitherto did sway; Let box now domineer Until the dancing Easter day, Or Easter’s eve appear.
Thus times do shift; each thing his turn does hold; New things succeed, as former things grow old.
Herrick describes the English family tradition of taking down the Christmas greens—rosemary, bay, mistletoe, holly—on Candlemas Eve, replacing them with boxwood, which would stay up for the duration of Lent.
“Burning the Christmas Greens,” uncredited illustration from the January 29, 1876, edition of Harper’s Weekly
The remaining three stanzas move through the rest of the church year, associating yew with Easter, birch with Pentecost, and rushes and oak with Ordinary Time. The changing of seasonal decorations becomes for Herrick an emblem of the transience of life.
Now have good day, now have good day! I am Christmas, but now I go my way.
Here have I dwelt with more and less [i.e., everyone] From Hallowtide till Candlemas, And now I must from you hence pass; Now have good day!
I take my leave of king and knight, Earl and baron, and lady bright; To wilderness I must me dight; [I must prepare myself to go into the wilderness] Now have good day!
And of the good lord of this hall I take my leave, and of guests all; Methinks I hear that Lent doth call; Now have good day!
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Another year I trust I shall Make merry in this hall, If rest and peace in our fair land may fall; Now have good day!
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Now fare ye well, all in fere; [together] Now fare ye well for all this year; Yet for my sake make ye good cheer; Now have good day!
This sixteenth-century carol is compiled in the commonplace book of the London merchant Richard Hill (Oxford, Balliol College MS 354).
Dawn Ng is a Singaporean multidisciplinary artist whose practice deals with time, memory, and the ephemeral. For her recent body of work Into Air, Ng has crafted nearly 150 large sculptural blocks of frozen pigment and documented their dissolution in the form of photographs, film, and residue paintings. A poetic visual meditation on time and its passing, Into Air captures the metamorphosis of colored ice from solid to liquid to air, physicalizing transience. Presented by Sullivan+Strumpf, it premiered at a derelict ship factory in Singapore in January 2021 and from there traveled to Seoul, London, and Sydney. See the six-minute documentary below for more on the process and meaning behind the work.
Dawn Ng in her studio in Singapore, surrounded by studies and artworks from Into Air. Photo: Sean Lee. All photos courtesy of the artist.
Ng started working on Into Air in 2018, and it’s ongoing. The project encompasses three distinct series:
Clocks
Time Lost Falling in Love
Ash
Clocks is the name Ng gives to the photo portraits of her colored glacier blocks at various stages of disintegration. Weighing about 132 pounds each, the blocks were constructed from acrylic paints, dyes, and inks that she froze together in her studio. After removing each block from the freezer, she and her team photographed it from ten different angles every four hours until it entirely eroded. “Like kaleidoscopic lodestones, the portraits visualize the shape, colour and texture that time inhabits in an ephemeral form,” Ng writes.
Dawn Ng (Singaporean, 1982–), If I could find a souvenir just to prove the world was here, from CLOCKS, 2021. Archival pigment print, 115 × 149 cm.Dawn Ng (Singaporean, 1982–), Some will fall in love with life and drink it from a fountain that is pouring like an avalanche coming down the mountain, from CLOCKS, 2021. Archival pigment print, 153 × 118 cm.Dawn Ng (Singaporean, 1982–), Don’t they know it’s the end of the world, from CLOCKS, 2022. Archival pigment print, 95 × 95 cm.
Time Lost Falling in Love is the collective title of the time-lapse videos Ng filmed of the thawing blocks. The collapse of each block into a puddle of liquid took fifteen to twenty hours, a process compressed into twenty to thirty minutes for each film. Ng says she wants to portray the fluidity of time—time as a “riot of colors” that swell and ebb, that form rivers and pools. By speeding up the frame rate of the film, Ng manipulates time, fast-tracking the dissolution of the blocks while simultaneously providing a calming evocation of a waterfall in slow motion. Time melting on. Here’s Avalanche II:
The third and final component of the Into Air project is Ash, a series of paintings created by blanketing the liquid remains of each melted pigment block with a large sheet of canvas-like paper. Ng leaves the paper there for weeks until all the liquid evaporates through it, creating marbled textures and thick buildups that she then peels away. Ng describes Ash as her attempt to “sieve time.”
Many of the photographs and residue paintings take their titles from song lyrics—by the Beatles, Genesis, the White Stripes, Death Cab for Cutie, Sufjan Stevens, and others.
Dawn Ng (Singaporean, 1982–), The Earth Laughs in Flowers I, 2020. Residue painting (acrylic, dye, ink) on paper, 165 × 142 cm.Dawn Ng (Singaporean, 1982–), Ever see, ever be, ever know my heart (detail), from ASH, 2022. Residue painting (acrylic, dye, ink) on paper, 199.5 × 150.3 cm.
There is an inescapable relationship between beauty and death. Death gives meaning to all of time. I don’t necessarily see death as something tragic, sad or final. It is that structure that gives true worth and true value to what comes before it. In Asia, especially as a Chinese Asian, we don’t like to talk about death. We feel it is bad luck. But in the paintings, I see death as something beautiful. Even in that last transition to nothingness, the pigments explode. They have a way of clinging on, they try to form tributaries, they flood a space. There is something very beautiful about that last gasp. It is not meek. It can be as strong as fireworks.
I would actually not use the word “nothingness” to describe the blocks’ final state. There’s definitely a “somethingness” still there after the melt! Behold the Ash paintings, which have a glory of their own. Although death is an end of sorts, it’s also a passing from this to that. Ng acknowledges as much. She even describes how “the melted pigments receive a form of resurrection through their incarnation as painterly formulae” in the Ash series. Resurrection!
From July 7 to 23, 2022, Into Air was exhibited, under the curation of Jenn Ellis, at St Cyprian’s, Clarence Gate, a historic church in London’s Marylebone district. The midcentury pews, pulpit, and altar inside the Gothic revival interior inspired Ng to design, in collaboration with EBBA architects, new wooden box structures to house the works, some of which stand vertically, and others which lay parallel to the floor.
Exhibition view of Into Air by Dawn Ng, St Cyprian’s Church, London, July 7–23, 2022. Photo: James Retief.Installation shot of Waterfall VII, 2022. Single-channel 4K video, 25 mins, 24 sec. Photo: James Retief. [watch video]
By displaying these works inside a sacred space, their spiritual implications become even more pronounced.
Impermanence is a theme that shows up in the sacred texts of all major religions, not least in the Bible, where we humans are reminded again and again of our mortality. Our days are like grass, which sprouts up and then withers (Isa. 40:6–7; Ps. 103:15–16; 1 Pet. 1:24). Our lives, but a sigh (Ps. 90:9–10), a shadow (Ps. 102:11), a mist (James 4:14), a breath (Ps. 39:5; Job 7:7; 7:16). We are made of dust and return to dust (Eccles. 3:20).
And not only are we finite; so is the present order of things. Even heaven and earth will pass away, Jesus says (Matt. 24:35; Mark 13:31; Luke 21:33; cf. Heb. 1:10–12). But, crucially, God and God’s word stand forever (Isa. 40:8; Matt. 7:24–27). True stability and unchangingness can be found only in God, Christians believe. God is a Rock that does not crumble, a strong foundation on which to stand, in life and in death.
The brevity of life may sound like a fearsome reality, but actually, it can serve to make our moments here on earth more precious and purposeful. Because our lives are but a short span, we must make the most of them while we can. Christians believe that everyone will one day have to give an account of what we did with the time God gifted to us. Did we share it freely with others, or keep it all for ourselves? Did we use it to cultivate virtue or to pursue vice?
The exhibition at St Cyprian’s also involved the premiere of a site-specific choral work by the London-based Welsh composer Alex Mills. A direct response to Ng’s art, his composition is also called Into Air and lasts about twenty-five minutes, the length of Ng’s Waterfall VII.
“In the piece,” Mills writes,
five singers undergo a musical meditation where each moves through the music to the rhythm of their own breaths, one bar of music for every exhale. Musical structures slowly build and disintegrate, evolve and transform, melt and evaporate. Textures, harmonies and colours – some delicate, others more pronounced – appear, disappear and re-emerge. Combing different singers’ breathing patterns gives the piece an indeterminate quality: the piece will never be the same twice and may even be radically different from one performance to the next. As such, the piece is not a fixed musical object that can be ‘performed’. Instead, it is a transient, ephemeral and elusive moment in time to be experienced.
The first singer stands at a kneeler. The second, at a pulpit. They establish the solemn mood. Two male singers sing from the organ loft, and another stands behind the rood screen with his arms crossed over his chest, as if in prayer. Haunting and mesmerizing, the five voices reflect off the stone architecture and meld together, sometimes harmoniously, sometimes in dissonance.
To everything there is a season. Starting at around 10:35, Mills incorporates keywords from Ecclesiastes 3:1–8, a biblical passage made especially famous by the Byrds: “gather,” “scatter,” “heal,” “kill,” “dance,” “mourn.” The author of Ecclesiastes is describing the tide of events that make up a life.
Periodically throughout the performance, a metal singing bowl resounds—a tool commonly used to deepen meditation. It is struck alternately by Ng and Mills, who are seated cross-legged at the front side of the church.
Dawn Ng and Alex Mills at the premiere of Mills’s Into Air, St Cyprian’s Church, London, July 8, 2022. Photo: Damian Griffiths and Sarah Isabelle Tan.
Mills’s Into Air received a second performance just last week on February 8 at the launch of Music & Being, an initiative he founded with Jess Dandy. Music & Being is an open laboratory space in London exploring the intersection of art, music, psychology, spirituality, ecology, and movement.
As we near Ash Wednesday, the start of Lent, Ng’s and Mills’s works remind us of how time slips and slides and ultimately ceases, at least time as we know it. What will we do with our fleeting lives? As they dissipate, what will remain? When our breath stops, will a resonance linger?
Art & Theology 