Ceri Richard's Deposition is an uncomfortably stark work. When it was first installed in St Mary's Church, Swansea, there were those who used dismissively to refer to its as 'The Road Accident in Calcutta'. It certainly does not reproduce the conventionally consoling aspects of most classical Deposition images, where the emotional register is often a sort of calm after pain, a somewhat drained quietness, shared by a little community of those who loved the crucified Jesus – his mother, Magdelene, John. In contrast, here is a composition where the emphasis is on the sheer physicality of the pain of the cross, unsoftened by any relaxation of line. The immensely exaggerated or swollen hands and feet are a powerful presentation of this puhysical anguish. There is no escape into the grief of bystander; the other figures sem muted and held at a distance by the enormity of the foregrounded fact of atrocity. This is a picture of the isolation and the anonymity of pain. No picturesque disciples or madonnas intervene between the viewer and the Crucified: we have to do the work ourselves of facing the dereliction of the dead saviour. In a sense, a very 'Protestant' version of a theme perhaps traditionally more visible in Catholic devotional art; and that may be why it is still a rather shockng presence in the liturgical setting. But it is also possible to see it as a necessary clearing of space around the cross – the cross which can be (is bound to be) overlaid with the community's interpretations and reactions. As I remember looking at it regularly as a teenager during services, I find that it did not in fact upset he liturgical act, but somehow anchored it in a disturbing material particularity – which ought to make sense of a kind when you think about the Eucharist.
Rowan Williams
The Archbishop of Canterbury
