When Joan and I lived with our children for a year in Ireland, we had to pay an official visit to the immigration office. I saw Joan looking closely and carefully at the place, and I wondered what was going on in her head. She was conceiving a public art project to be in direct response to the lack of beauty, civility, and respect for persons we saw in that place, attitudes quite different from those we found generally among the Irish people.
Once again, she linked spiritual practice with art by painting small pictures of the Irish sky at four am and four pm every day for three months. She called the work "Office Hours," an allusion to the chanting of psalms by monks at specific times of the day. The paintings are the size of twenty-pound notes, reflecting officers' concerns about the financial status of immigrants. In several months the 184 paintings were completed and exhibited in a small glassed-in cubicle at the entrance to the immigration office, creating what she saw to be a "chapel" for people coming to make a life in Ireland.
The clouds are not symbols, but they do suggest to the Irish the particular sky that is so familiar to them, and to immigrants and immigration officials the notion that some things take no notice of artificial national boundaries. I have my own associations to these clouds: a sense of time passing in relation to the weather, echoes of Turner's subtle landscapes, the sheer beauty of the twilight and daybreak sky, my love of Ireland, and Joan's skill at evoking many layers of experience in a single, commonplace natural object.
The sky is an image that often suggests infinity, divinity, fate, and the mysterious. But clouds bring it close, making an otherwise pure and limitless space intimate and imagistic. There is something friendly about the clouds that speed over Ireland keeping the land green with gentle showers for the most part. These qualities are compressed in the beautiful small paintings Joan gathered together for her complete project. They also represent her current interest in playing a role as an artist in the life of the commons, those areas of public life that are not interpreted fully by politics, government, and the media. Joan's paintings of the clouds bring a sacred perspective to the movement of people among nations, offering both a critique of current immigration methods and a more natural, spiritual, and humane vision.