Graham
Maule – liturgist, writer, artist, musician
Born
September 28, 1958; died December 29, 2019
Graham Maule,
who has died aged 61, was a visionary, whether as youth worker, artist or
musician. In the main, and at its most public, with his creative partner John
Bell, Maule was co-creator of some of the most powerful, inclusive and socially
engaged Christian liturgies across the globe. Throughout all of this, he
brought an instinctive desire to reach outwards and bring people into everything
he did. Driven by a deceptively quiet dynamism and a willingness to engage with
everyone and everything that interested him, Maule fused art, activism and
worship into a rich life in which his modesty and generosity of spirit shone
through.
Graham
Alexander Maule was born in Glasgow, the eldest of four children to Tom and
Margaret Maule, and showed artistic inclinations from an early age. This
manifested itself first at Glasgow High School, then at Glasgow University’s
Mackintosh School of Architecture, from which he graduated in 1980. If things
had gone according to plan, his life would have been mapped out as precisely as
a technical drawing. But three months before sitting his professional
examinations, he left architecture, signed on the dole, and moved as volunteer
youth worker into what was then a socially degraded area of Glasgow.
This
was partly due to a chance meeting with John Bell, then youth co-ordinator for
Glasgow Presbytery. It saw the start of a forty-year collaboration in youth
work, liturgical innovation, song writing and engagement in action for social
justice. From an innovative gathering for teenagers called Last of the Month,
Bell and Maule formed a cadre of youth volunteers based in deprived housing
areas. Under the aegis of The Iona Community, they formed a worship group of
young adults which developed new materials for corporate liturgy and led to the
formation of the Wild Goose Resource Group, whose publications are translated
and sold world-wide.
Numerous
recordings and publications which they co-authored saw them share resources
that became a template for a form of liturgy rooted in the everyday experience
of the common man and woman. While song was the bedrock of the Group, it’s not
difficult to recognise in some of the scripted dialogues the influence of poet
Tom Leonard and other Glasgow writers introducing a localised demotic into
previously rarefied worlds, ruffling feathers as they went. More than thirty
publications produced by the Group and its professional successor the Wild
Goose Resource Group were illustrated by Maule. While his monochrome images
resembled expressionist wood-cuts, in colour, their figurative largesse looked
born from the same imaginative universe as Alasdair Gray or the 1980s new wave
of Glasgow-sired painters.
In this
way, Maule’s work tapped into both art history and popular culture, and while
he continued to work with the Wild Goose Resource Group, his eventual re-connection
with artistic expression in a broader way was inevitable. He enrolled at Leith
Art School in Edinburgh, then at the University of Edinburgh, where he gained
first an MA, then a Ph.D. For the latter, his thesis Sacer Ludus (Sacred Game)
explored the relationship between ritual, performance and worship as well as
architecture and spirituality. The
previous thirty years’ experience, it seemed, had been building blocks working
towards a much larger philosophy rooted in Maule’s faith.
Maule’s own
practice was a kind of total art that bridged film, sculptural installation and
performance to create a form of social sculpture that tapped into the power of
a shared communal experience he’d been engaging with his whole life. In this
way, Maule’s creations shown at home and abroad chimed with a current of socially
engaged art rooted in the work of German artist Joseph Beuys and, closer to
home, the community-based environmental and public art of David Harding. In
this sense, Maule’s created environments were both holy and deeply political.
This was the case both in its democratic intent and in the fact that it
couldn’t be monetised and sold off to the highest bidder.
Here
again, sound and song were vital parts of Maule’s art in an attempt to evoke
both an emotional and a physical response as it conjured up sense memories in
the minds and bodies of those immersed in the experience. Throughout all this, Maule
possessed a deep-rooted and passionate integrity, so art, faith and politics
existed as one alongside his personal relationships in a life driven by the
power of faith, hope and love.
Maule is survived by his partner Mel, his mother
Margaret, his sisters Aileen and Susan and his brother Stuart.
The Herald, January 28th 2020
Ends
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