Leaving and Coming Back: A visual history of the pomegranate

Late in June, I found myself in the heart of Middlesbrough, gathered for a talk about my portrait project “Drawn to the Boro”. I sat with three wonderful people who have shared not just their time but also their stories - which included moments of laughter, reflection, and vulnerability. (You can find out more about the project here.)

Pattern is at the heart of my practice. Each portrait becomes enriched by the unique stories entrusted to me by each sitter. One day, a friend nudged me to look at Middlesbrough itself as a source of pattern. The idea clicked instantly: every sitter had chosen this town as home. Middlesbrough’s textures and symbols deserved a place in their portraits, too.

So I went looking. Middlesbrough was founded in 1830, and its Victorian buildings are covered in the confident symbolism of the industrialists who built it: festoons for abundance, lions for strength, acanthus for endurance. On the side of the Middlesbrough Empire I found a pomegranate. It is a small, almost inconsequential piece of ornament, but it was almost certainly put there to signify prosperity. People have given the pomegranate meaning for thousands of years, so this month I pulled the thread to see where it led.

It led a long way back. The pomegranate is one of the first fruits humans ever cultivated, domesticated in Iran and the Near East around 4,000 BCE, and it was sacred almost as soon as it was domesticated. In Mesopotamia it belonged to Inanna, goddess of love and war; people left the fruit at her temple to ask for abundance. Those associations travelled along the trade routes and settled into the Greek goddesses: Aphrodite, Hera, and, above all, Persephone. 

Persephone's is the story I love best. Daughter of the harvest goddess Demeter, she is carried off to the underworld by Hades. Before she can be freed, she eats a few of those ruby seeds, and in the old logic, to eat the food of the dead is to belong to their world. So she can never leave completely. She spends part of every year below and part above, and her going and returning is what makes the seasons: her mother's grief is our autumn and winter, her return our spring. A whole year turning on one fruit, a story about leaving, and coming back.

The pomegranate turns up again and again in art. William Morris was one of many designers who reached back to medieval patterns for meaning that the industrial age had lost.

Following the thread this far, I began to understand why the pomegranate had caught my eye. There is an analogy in it for me too: the tough skin protecting all those luminous, jewelled seeds is not far from a portrait sitting - the guarded surface, and then what someone decides to let me see over a few hours together. And its oldest meaning, abundance, fits the people I have been painting in Middlesbrough exactly. Without exception, they met the project with warmth, openness and generosity. Whatever else the pomegranate has meant, that is what I see in it now.