Reaching Beyond

Today I visited the Reaching Beyond exhibition at Bow Road Methodist Church and met Richard Smith, one of the artists and organisers.

Reaching Beyond is an exhibition celebrating the human spirit reaching beyond the mundane both through endeavour and an openness to something transcendent. The exhibition's title is intentionally open to a wide range of interpretation and the work shown by the 19 artists included invites those who see it to think afresh, and reach beyond their assumptions. The range of media and styles featured is also correspondingly broad with fabrics, icons, mosaics, paintings and sculptures all included. The recent renovation of the church makes it, among other things, an excellent exhibition space. The sculptures set on the exterior provide an arresting beginning to the show and certainly drew other visitors  into the building over the course of my visit.

Richard Smith is one half of Smith and Moore (the other being David Moore). The pair have been friends and colleagues since 1966, and have been creating sculptures together since 1994. In their art they explore/question/challenge serious matters with humour, levity and a touch of incredulity. They bring to this their experience of living and working within poor communities, political and social engagement, and reflection on theology. David is a Methodist minister and runs Colloquy, an art and theology project which is part of the Methodist Church, from which the idea for the exhibition grew. Richard has had a varied career, ranging from research in physical chemistry to community development and management, with illustrating having been taken in along the way.

From early 2012 Smith and Moore sent their small, sturdy sculpture, the Visitor, on an uncharted journey via churches and other organisations through five London boroughs (Greenwich, Hackney, Newham, Tower Hamlets and Waltham Forest). People seeing the Visitor on its journey sent in photographs and notes of what happen, all of which are posted on the project's website and have been used in the exhibition along with the Visitor itself.

Other particularly strong work in the exhibition includes: Aaron Distler's abstract ‘Fire Drawings’ (using paper which has been treated and burnt to create extraordinary effects contained within frames which are themselves part of the work); Robert Koenig's monumental wood figures symbolising the artist’s ancestors as part of a search for ancestral and sculptural roots; Jean Lamb, an Anglican Priest living in Nottingham, who is a woodcarver in the storytelling tradition and is showing two casts from Stations of the Holocaust which follow the path of Christ to the Cross, each one including in the background images from the record of the Jewish holocaust during the Second World War; and Santiago Bell, a brilliant artist, educator, political activist and thinker imprisoned and tortured by the Pinochet regime in the 1970s, who expressed his insights and reflected on his experience in finely carved, imaginative, wooden constructions, such as Age of Emptiness.

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After The Fire - Joy.