1. PAGE PICTURES
In Settings of the Psalms, the paintings and prints are informed by a decorative and devotional tradition of the text-based image, wherein typographic forms painted on the interiors of church buildings assumed an almost iconic significance. The new works follow suit, but connect with another, related tradition of visual imagery that also developed in response to the Protestant ban on icons. 
Seventeenth-century Protestant artists, while prohibited from making images as mediators of worship in church, depicted biblical stories and persons as an aid to religious instruction in the home. Thy also portrayed the devotional habits of contemporary believers. In both genre, artists objectified the Bible (either in part or as a whole) by representing a manuscript or an open book contemplated by an Apostle, a prophet, an Evangelist, or an earnest disciple from the artists' own time. In the domestic devotional scenes, the pictorialized Bible served as a visual emblem that signified not only a divinely inspired artefact but also the relevance of its message for the present-day, the liberation of the Scriptures following the Gutenberg revolution, and their availability in the reader's vernacular. 
The artists represented the Bible often at a distance from the picture-plane or on a small scale, and with an eye to perceptual realism. Consequently, the text columns are rendered - out-of-focus, indistinct, and unreadable - as a series of either summary calligraphic marks denoting letters, or broken lines of different lengths corresponding to words. The pictorialization of the Bible, in this way, translated the printed text into a manual inscription in an incomprehensible 'language' (reverting the Bible to its pre-Gutenberg condition). The process abstracts the letters, words, and sentences of the text, converting the literary source of spiritual contemplation into an object of visual perception - a formal proposition without verbal sense.

Following this tradition, the works in The Pictorial Bible II exhibition do not interpret the text literally (that is, with the intent of communicating its plain sense fully and legibly). Instead, text and page (together) are distilled, following a specific rationale suggested by the content of the text or ideas derived from the broader culture of Protestantism. In some instances, the works apply, straightforwardly, the synoptic methods used by Dutch painters. In other pictures, the abstraction results from a combination of technical and conceptual processes such as enlarging, cropping, codification, sampling, scanning, and other forms of pictorial manipulation. Whereas in Dutch painting, the represented Bible pages are one element of the total picture, in the new works they constitute the entirety. The paintings and drawings often derive from studies and plans generated digitally. Thus, the biblical text is presented using today's new technology, just as it was during the fifteenth century, through printing. 

2. INSCRIPTION IMAGES
Even after the invention of printing, believers still reproduced the Bible by hand. For example, girls and young women wrought in embroidery verses from texts such as the Beatitudes, Lord's Prayer, and Ten Commandments. These samplers were made chiefly by as a means of developing literacy, learning the Scripture, and applying its lessons to their lives. Protestants commonly learned Scripture, consigning to memory large portions of the Scripture by writing them out repeatedly. Writing or inscription was also the agency through which the Scripture was originally recorded by the prophets, Apostles and Evangelists. Thus it was, by association, a sacred process; God himself, it is said, inscribed the Ten Commandments on the stone tables with his finger. He commanded the Israelites to write portions of Scripture on doorposts, sticks, and the ground, and bind the word of God to their fingers and foreheads. Written words were, in this sense, not only the medium of meaning but also a visual sign (variously of covenant, judgement, and protection). The relationship between writing and image is evident in other ways. Visions and dreams received by the prophets and apostles were translated into holy writ following God's express edict: 'write up the vision and make it plain upon tables'. The new works compound these various traditions of Scripture writing. Deploying inscription, superscription, and strategies of memorisation, the works reunite word-based image making and spiritual contemplation and return the written description of visions and dreams to the condition of an image. 

3. CODIFIED IMAGES
Several new works adapt the process (which informed the writing-up of visions and dreams, above) of converting an image into a text. The visual source is illustrations of significant events and persons from the Old and New Testaments in printed Bibles. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, these took the form of steel-plate engravings derived from famous religious paintings from the Renaissance to the Victorian period. In the new works, these engravings, illustrating the visions of the prophets, are codified as a letter strand. This, in turn, serves as the starting point for visual translation, thereby converting the text back to an image, albeit of a very different order to the original source. 

4. INTERPRETED CODICES
Other works return to the primary integration of image and text in Judaeo-Christian tradition - the illuminated manuscript. The aim is undertake an interpretative, visual transformation of codices with a view mediating new perspectives on the original. The works, it is envisaged, would be based on artefacts belonging to the libraries and museums hosting the exhibition. Conceivably, the hosts could coordinate displays and projects based on their collection illuminated manuscripts to complement The Pictorial Bible II (following the example of National Library of Wales's Word and Image exhibition, held in conjunction with Settings of the Psalms).

5. CODIFIED TEXTS
These works follow the methodology deployed in the Settings of the Psalms, in which the lettering in conjunction with a thematic motif of the source text determine the formal properties of the image - its complexity, proportion, shape, colour, surface, and components.

An explanatory and illustrated publication by John Harvey accompanies the project.
 

Conditions
The artist reserves the right to alter, delete, or substitute the ideas, systems, and proposals described herein in the course of the exhibition's development. 

Venues
Works from the Pictorial Bible Series, Wesley's Chapel, London (1 November 2007 - 8 January 2008)

The Pictorial Bible I: Settings of the Psalms