Advent Art & Church Times article

Year Six children from Downshall Primary School visit the Advent Art Installation at St John's Seven Kings

Detail of the Advent Art Installation

The Advent Art Installation at St John's Seven Kings

Henry Shelton and I having completed work on the Installation

Bishop David with the Advent Art Installation

The Advent Art Installation features in this week's edition of The Church Times. My article on the project can be found by clicking here.

The article quotes from the meditation that I wrote for the project which draws out some of the concepts that the design group had in mind when we were working on the Installation's design:

“The sombre colours and rectangular voids of this abstract artwork may recall works by Mark Rothko which hang in Tate Modern. Rothko’s later paintings have often been understood as depictions of the absence of God and the darkness of the world; an impression reinforced by Rothko’s suicide on the day that the Tate received those paintings.

Similarly, St Paul wrote that our experience in life is that of seeing in a mirror dimly; we do not see clearly and our understanding of life is clouded, he seemed to say. That may also be our experience in this installation, where the abstract colour has been applied to mirrored perspex, clouding our ability to see clearly in the mirrored panels of the installation. Yet the poet, Martin Wroe, has written that God can be seen as ‘the abstract art of paint and poem when our propaganda makes everything clear’.

In the darkness of the abstract design, we can still see reflected the candles, lit within the space where the artwork stands, and picked out on the panels, forming a star, are also lines of clear reflection. The light beaming from the star on the right panel is linked by a line to the repeated word ‘Peace’ on the left. In what ways might there be links be­tween light and peace in the darkness of our world?

What do we see as we look into the blurred and clear mirrored spaces of this installation? Essentially, as in any mirror, we see ourselves, both blurred and distinct. Are we defined by the darkness or are we one of the many points of light reflected in the darkness of this design? Is the reflection of our light blurred or distinct as we shine in the world? In what ways could we be­come light bringers and peace makers? After all, it is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.”

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Jide Chord - Better Ma Follow Mi.