Arts, Faiths and Culture

I spent a fair bit of the past week at the Art and Christianity Enquiry (ACE) International Conference in Cambridge. What I hadn't realised before going was just how much of an international network ACE is. At the conference were artists, arts professionals, art and theology educators, and priests drawn from Australia, Finland, France, Germany and USA, as well as the UK. Among the organisations represented were Association Spiritualité et Art, the Cathedral Church of St John the Divine New York, Gustavus Adolphus College, the Society for the Arts in Religious and Theological Studies (SARTS), and the University of Jyväskylän.

The conference had been organised by Graham Howes, ACE Trustee and Fellow of Trinity Hall Cambridge, and was entitled Art, Faiths and Culture - Convergence and Conflict. Professor Wilson Yates gave the keynote address which briefly surveyed the history of Christian Art before suggested ways of categorising Contemporary Religious Art. Many of the participants contributed papers to the conference and these included presentations on: Interfaith communication through the visual arts; Marc Chagall and the problem of a Jewish Crucifixion; Kandinsky's 'The Art of the Spiritual' revisited; Renzo Piano's dual project for the site of the Ronchamp Chapel; and The Religion of Modernism and the Problem of Beauty. Perhaps most interesting of all the presentations I heard was Professor Eamon Duffy's lecture on Images of Eve which explored the way in which Eve has been represented in Western Art. I came away with ideas for photomontages that I hope to be able to work on soon.

In addition to the presentations and discussions, there were also a number of visits to exhibitions and artworks. Most of these I missed due to other commitments but I was fortunate enough to be on the tour of Religious Art in Cambridge and the trip to Kettles Yard where, as well as viewing the collection in Jim Ede's house, we also heard from the current exhibiting artist Edmund De Waal. De Waal is a major ceramacist who arranges his pots into sculptures of varying sizes and locations to explore combinations of apertures, shadows, shapes and spaces.