We've been into London today sampling the Visual Art exhibitions in the Pentecost Festival. We started with the Social Issues & Our Response photographic display at the Cafe Eterno in Covent Garden where the above photos were taken.
This is a modest but varied exhibition including scenes from SOULINTHECITY, a Compassion project, Hertford stns (my contribution) and a Miss Pole Dancing competition. Active response is contrasted with the enduring challenge of sin and the efficacy of our responses questioned.
While enjoying a healthy and appetising lunch at the Cafe, we opened up a leaflet about a performance at the Cafe from the previous night only to find a photo and write up of our good friend Mandy Stone. Mandy had given her testimony at the Cafe following a performance of Does The Shoe Fit? What a coincidence that we had both had a link with the Cafe over the same weekend!
From there I went to Westminster Central Hall for the Gifts exhibition that was a part of Pentecost People. Here I found a much more varied exhibition than I had anticipated including installations, ceramics, photographics and both abstract and representational paintings. The exhibition had been curated by Alison Lilley Berrett using artists linked to the Ark T Centre in Cowley, Oxford. The Art T Centre is a creative arts project opened in 1997 at the initiative of a church and a group of artists committed to creating space for the arts. It believes that creativity through the arts can allow people to discover new things about themselves and others and so unlock the potential for change. The Centre has six resident artists who, as well as developing their own work, provide workshops enabling others to discover their creativity sometimes for the first time.
Sue-Jane Mott's ceramic installations instantly attracted the eye. 130 ceramic bottle forms were shaped to form a pathway symbolising our life journeys while 24 Golden Bowls drew on the image from Revelation of 24 elders offering golden bowls symbolising prayers to God. From their exterior Mott's bowls looked like fragile papier-mache constructions composed of written prayers but, with their shining metallic interiors, were solid constructions, that gleamed in the light of the room.
Clay Sinclair paints backwards in acrylics onto perspex and the results are vibrant, primal images laced with humour and questioning what we see. Alison Lilley Berrett also works in an abstract expressionist style creating meditative images reflective of core Christian themes of love, life, breath. Tim Steward's work, while popular and ubiquitous at Christian festivals, is only pleasantly decorative in its weaving of enlongated charismatic figures into abstract backdrops. Finally, Kate Cunningham had created a photographic series of still lifes that used contrasts of light and dark to explore communion and crucifixion.
Gifts revealed a diversity and energy that I had not expected to find in an exhibition at what is at base an evangelical Christian festival. This is, therefore, an exhibition of encouragement for the future and a sign of the value of artists grouping together for mutual support, critique and development.
For posts on other aspects of the Pentecost Festival see Dave Walker's Church Times blog by clicking here and here.
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onehundredhours - King Of Every Heart.
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