HeartEdge Mailer | December 2019

HeartEdge is an international ecumenical movement initiated by St Martin-in-the-Fields, London.

• We are churches and other organisations developing mission.
• We focus on 4 wide-ranging areas - commercial activity, compassion, cultural engagement and congregational development.

The mailer is our monthly compilation of stories, web links and original writing, related to our 4 key areas.

This month:

• A focus on intentional communities and new monastic communities
• Banksy at Christmas in Birmingham,, plus how to curate art in churches
• Martin Laird on silence and spirituality and Hannah Malcolm on realism and Sami Award on being light in dark times.
• 'Grandad's Front Room' plus Social enterprise tips, and social investment - leveraging in funding from repayable finance
• Plus Jess Foster learning from the Little Town of Bethlehem.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Emmylou Harris - All My Tears Be Washed Away.

RA Summer Exhibition

Run without interruption since 1769, the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts is the world’s largest open submission art show and brings together art in all mediums – prints and paintings, film, photography, sculpture, architectural works and more – by leading artists, Royal Academicians and household names as well as new and emerging talent.

This year, acclaimed British painter Jock McFadyen RA takes the mantle from Grayson Perry to co-ordinate the 251st Summer Exhibition. Over 1,500 works are on display, most of them for the first time. Highlights include an animal-themed ‘menagerie’ in the Central Hall, with works by artists including Polly Morgan, Charles Avery, Banksy and Mat Collishaw. Artist sisters Jane and Louise Wilson RA have curated two galleries, one of which showcases work exploring light and time. Further artists exhibiting include Jeremy Deller, Marcus Harvey, Tracey Emin RA, Frank Bowling RA, Antony Gormley RA and Honorary Academicians Anselm Kiefer, James Turrell and Wim Wenders.

Outside the galleries, international artist Thomas Houseago has taken over the RA’s courtyard with a group of large-scale sculptural works, and the exhibition spills out into nearby Bond Street with a colourful installation of flags featuring work by Michael Craig-Martin RA.

In addition to the above check out the following:

• 'Agony in the Garden', 'Death of the Virgin', 'Deposition' and 'The Visitation' by Paula Rego;
• 'Rachmaninoff. Piano Concert No. 2' by Alexander Mochalov;
• 'Three Paper Darts' and 'All The Tape Left Over From My Last Painting' by Alastair Gordon;
• 'Passing By' and 'Across The Station' by Peter S. Smith; and
• 'Blues' from the Series 'Song of Solomon' by Clack & Cargill.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

T Bone Burnett · Jay Bellerose · Keefus Ciancia - A Man Without A Country (All Data Are Compromised).

Peter Kennard: Peace on Earth

The Guardian reports that Peter Kennard, the artist famous for his incendiary photomontages, is giving away a new image responding to the bombing of Syria and the refugee crisis. Kennard is Britain’s most important political artist whose imagery has become synonymous with the modern protest movement.

As a New Year gift, available to download for free in high quality, he and his collaborator, renowned graphic designer Neville Brody, have "produced a work called Peace on Earth featuring what appears to be the Virgin Mary praying – only her halo has been replaced by the CND symbol and her face with planet Earth."

“The idea is to give something back at this time of year, and as a designer,” he says. “I wanted to make an image that makes people think – and isn’t too horrific for them to put on their wall.”

“I use that image of our planet a lot – which is what we’re destroying,” he says. “The refugee crisis is so horrific, and the way human beings are talked about in terms of ‘how many can we take’ is so demeaning. It’s people’s responses that have been human, not the politicians, who are just thinking of their votes. I’m trying to show this enormous outpouring of feeling.”

In a conversation about Art, Design, Protest and Generosity on the RCA website he says:

"At the heart of mobilising positive, peaceful activism is a radical, subversive generosity on the part of artists and designers, which runs counter to any social structure that privileges the ‘I’ over the ‘we’, and refutes the unfestive – but nonetheless accurate – observation that we may no longer know how to give without counting the cost.

Giving breaks the cycle of greed, and encourages people to be generous, community-minded and constructive. It’s about doing something for the sake of change, for the common good – which is what the original peace symbol was about. There’s a refreshing positivity to giving freely, which runs counter to one’s normal transactions in the world.

Anyone who’s been involved in the best bits of peaceful activism knows that mobilising positive human energy is life affirming. Like singing in a Christmas choir, one of the reasons to go on a march is to be there in a group of people who believe the human race isn’t doomed after all.

As artist Jimmy Durham says, ‘Humanity is not a completed project,’ meaning both that we are still here and that we need to try harder. Artists and designers have a long tradition of bending the tools of their trade to that cause, beating swords into aesthetic ploughshares.

The role of art may be to expose the underbelly of society, and the role of design may be to communicate ideas, but add in generosity and you arrive at the joining of makers' hands, the giving of gifts and the will for collective change.

In the festive spirit of munificence, Peter Kennard and Neville Brody have collaborated to produce a new work for our troubled times: Peace on Earth. Download it, print it, share it. We wish you a peaceful new year."

Download Peace on Earth here.

The first major retrospective of Kennard's work is at the Imperial War Museum London until 30 May 2016 and demonstrates how Kennard has consistently confronted issues in world politics and British governmental policy both at home and abroad, inspiring many of today’s politically-aware artists from Mark Wallinger to Banksy.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Steve Mason - Oh, My Lord.

Exhibitions update

Hide and Seek, coincides with the publication of a monograph celebrating Eileen Cooper’s career, and presents drawings spanning almost 40 years. Cooper creates work that possesses a strongly poetic and distinctive vision, and the artist has been described as a ‘magical realist’. An accomplished painter and printmaker, Cooper’s practice has always been underpinned by drawing. This remarkable body of work illustrates how her distinctive imagery has developed through making drawings that explore such subjects as sexuality, birth, family, fecundity and creativity.

Cross-sensory perception quickens and multiplies in Smell of First Snow, Shirazeh Houshiary’s eighth exhibition at Lisson Gallery. Through painting, drawing and sculpture, Houshiary approaches the intangible and evanescent, articulating a metaphysical reality that lies beyond mere form and surface.

Peter Kennard is Britain’s most important political artist whose imagery has become synonymous with the modern protest movement. The first major retrospective of his work at the Imperial War Museum demonstrates how Kennard has consistently confronted issues in world politics and British governmental policy both at home and abroad, inspiring many of today’s politically-aware artists from Mark Wallinger to Banksy.

Marking thirty years since his first solo exhibition at Flowers Gallery, former official British War Artist John Keane presents a new series of paintings on the themes of power and conflict - Speaking Truth to Power at 21 Cork Street. Keane’s work has been engaged in a dialogue with unfolding news stories since the 1980s, travelling overseas to witness conflicts first hand. His work challenges received wisdom and explores alternative narratives to those exerted by the press - from his representation of the atrocities of war, to his portraits of the people made powerful by their place in and behind the media spotlight. The Wisdom of Hindsight is a retrospective of Keane's work at 82 Kingsland Road.

Zi Ling is a visual artist currently based in Beijing and London, working in watercolour, etching, short film and installation, who has work in the Society of Women Artists 154th Annual Exhibition at Mall Galleries. Following this show will be the New English Art Club Annual Open Art Exhibition 2015 which showcases the work of some of the finest figurative painters at work today, members’ paintings, drawings and original prints are shown alongside work selected from the open submission.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Lenny Kravitz - Let Love Rule.

Christian Aid Partnership Project sermon

Israel and Palestine are places of contrasts. Three of the world’s religions claim holy ancestry here. Christians, Jews and Muslims worship alongside one another as signposts which point to church, mosque and synagogue in Acco or Acre indicate. The view of the skyline in Nazareth shows the dome of the Greek Roman Catholic Church alongside the minaret of the White Mosque. Both claim to be built on the site of the original synagogue in Nazareth. In Hebron, at the Tombs of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs, a mosque and synagogue are located within the same building.

All of this worship is centred on Jerusalem and on the Old City in particular. Jews worship at the Western Wall, the remains of the Temple built by Herod, Christians walk in the footsteps of Jesus on the Via Dolorosa to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and Muslims pray at the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount.

All this was occurring during our recent visit to the Holy Land made as part of a tour organised by the East London Three Faiths Forum. However, as we travelled we were also inevitably aware of various signs of tensions between the faiths and tensions within the faiths such as, for example, the ladder on a ledge outside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre left where it is as it cannot be moved without the agreement of all the denominations represented in this church.

Bullet holes in street signs indicated past conflicts, as did war memorials and live mines in the Golan Heights. There were armoured vehicles outside our hotel in Jerusalem and at the Tombs of the Patriarchs in Hebron. A missile launcher was located above the Garden Tomb in Jerusalem and soldiers were on the streets in the Old City and in Hebron.

To reach Bethlehem we passed through the security wall or separation barrier which Israel began building in 2002 to cut itself off from the Occupied Palestinian Territories. This was justified as a response to violence and has stopped most of the suicide bombings which were then occurring regularly. The barrier has exacerbated the humanitarian crisis facing the Palestinian people, has annexed land and divided communities but, most of all, has come to symbolise the divide between the two peoples at the heart of the Middle East crisis.

Movement within – and in and out of – the West Bank is controlled by 540 Israeli checkpoints, roadblocks, earth mounds and gates, plus an average 100 ‘flying checkpoints’ on Palestinian roads every week. Checkpoints, roadblocks, the separation barrier, earth mounds and a Kafkaesque permit system are the daily reality for Palestinians. The Gaza Strip is largely cut off, while obstacles in the West Bank have created isolated enclaves that sever economic ties, separate communities and deny Palestinians access to some fifty per cent of the land.

In the West Bank, illegal Israeli settlements take up Palestinian land and water resources and create restrictions on movement that impede Palestinian access to education, healthcare and employment, as well as restricting the economy – all contributing to poverty.

In Acco we saw these ‘Not for Sale’ signs in an Arab area of the City. Our guide explained that the Orthodox buy homes in Arab or secular Israeli areas and then begin to impose the Mosaic Law in ways that eventually force the original occupiers of the area to move out. Arab and secular Israeli’s have, therefore, begun making agreements in their communities not to sell to Orthodox families.

At least 65 per cent of Palestinians were living below the poverty line in 2007, compared to 54 per cent in 2005 and 20 per cent in 1998. As we walked through the Old City in Hebron relative levels of poverty were clear when compared with similar markets elsewhere.

The confiscation of land, the expansion of Israeli settlements and the building of the separation barrier all create facts of the ground which exacerbate poverty and undermine the whole notion of a viable Palestinian state.

Our tour of the Holy Land ended at Yad Vashem. Established in 1953, as the world center for documentation, research, education and commemoration of the Holocaust, Yad Vashem safeguards the memory of the past and imparts its meaning for future generations.

The Holocaust was the murder by Nazi Germany of six million Jews. While the Nazi persecution of the Jews began in 1933, the mass murder was committed during World War II. It took the Germans and their accomplices four and a half years to murder six million Jews. Most of the Jews of Europe were dead by 1945. A civilization that had flourished for almost 2,000 years was no more.

The survivors, dazed, emaciated, bereaved beyond measure, gathered the remnants of their vitality and the remaining sparks of their humanity, and rebuilt. They never meted out justice to their tormentors – for what justice could ever be achieved after such a crime? Rather, they turned to rebuilding: new families forever under the shadow of those absent; new life stories, forever warped by the wounds; new communities, forever haunted by the loss. As a quote displayed at Yad Veshem states, ‘From among the horror grew another morality, another love, another compassion. These grew wild – no one gave them a name.’

So, just as we must denounce the sufferings of the Holocaust, we must also denounce the sufferings for Palestinians which have followed the political response to the Holocaust, the establishment of the state of Israel.

As a group of Christians, Jews and Muslims travelling harmoniously to tour our holy sites together, the East London Three Faiths Forum is a sign that peace and understanding across the faiths can be achieved. We pray therefore not for Arab or Jew, for Palestinian or Israeli, but pray rather for ourselves, that we might not divide them in our prayers but keep them both together in our hearts.

Christian Aid has been working with the poorest people in the region since the early 1950s, when they first provided help to Palestinian refugees. Today they are working with more than 20 Israeli and Palestinian organisations to protect human rights, access to services and resources, and to build peace based on justice for all.

This includes a project which has provided Palestinian families with video cameras, as well as surveillance cameras for those under threat from the settlers breaking into their homes and physically and verbally abusing them. To protect one family, a Christian Aid partner built a metal ‘cage’ around their home to protect them from physical abuse. The mother says; ‘The camera makes life better for us, it stops the settlers. For example, if I film them, they are more careful, or they run away.’

In Lebanon and the West Bank, there are approximately 500,000 people living with disabilities. Practical difficulties, discrimination and outdated attitudes towards people with disabilities prevent them from fully participating in society and the workplace. The Christian Aid partnership project which we have been supporting here at St John's Seven Kings, delivered in partnership with the Lebanese Physically Handicapped Union (LPHU) and the East Jerusalem YMCA, is directly benefiting 30,000 people living in Lebanon and the West Bank over its three-year lifetime. Its wider impact will improve prospects for many thousands more and continue to make a difference into the future. The money we are donating to this project helps to: provide training and careers guidance for people living with disabilities; improve job prospects for people living with disabilities; improve working conditions, including workplace adaptation; increase awareness of issues people living with disabilities face – particularly among employers; and improve the laws that protect the rights of people living with disabilities. The EU is match funding this project three times over – meaning that the £5,000 we are raising will transform into £20,000 for people living with disabilities in Lebanon and the West Bank. Today was our final opportunity at St John's Seven Kings to give towards this project.

The Palestinian-Israeli situation today shows the futility of violence, where endless repression and resistance feed off each other. As Banksy's powerful images in Bethlehem suggest, in the Middle East the dove of peace has to wear a bullet-proof vest. From this cycle of repression and violence, conflict and provocation, come the bitter fruits of poverty. Action – including the support of projects like the Christian Aid partnership project - is urgently needed to break this cycle of diminishing hope.

As Naim Ateek, director of the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Centre in Jerusalem, has said: ‘Both nations must “do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with God”. Once those biblical demands of justice have been satisfied, a good measure of peace will be achieved. The result will then be a new and deeper security enjoyed by all throughout the land.’ So may we pray, as Psalm 122 encourages us, for the peace of Jerusalem, recognizing its impact throughout Israel and Palestine and on all who view it as a holy city.

A prayer for justice and peace in the land of the Holy One: Living Lord, ignite in us a passion for justice and a yearning to right all wrong. Strengthen us to work for peace in the land we call Holy: for peace among Jew, Christian and Muslim, for reconciliation between communities, for harmony between faiths. Inspire us to act with the urgency of your quickening fire, for blessed are the peacemakers they shall be called the children of God. (Ramani Leathard, Trustee, Amos Trust)

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Herbert Howells - O Pray For The Peace Of Jerusalem.

East London Three Faiths Forum trip to the Holy Land (3)

Today we went through the wall to Bethlehem where we queued to go into the Grotto of the Nativity. Like the Church of the Holy Sepulchre yesterday, this was an incredibly busy place combining devotion with tourism. We also saw one Banksy's graffiti designs - a dove of peace with a bullet-proof vest - close to the wall itself.

We then followed the wall for part of the way to Hebron, passing some of the settlements in Area C, before arriving at the Tombs of the Patriarchs in Hebron. This is a shrine complex mainly built by Herod, with additions by the Crusaders, which is now houses a Mosque and a Synagogue. The Jewish members of our group visited the synagogue, while the rest of us went to visit the shrines to Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and Leah. Then we all went into the Old Town for a short time.

Lastly, the Christian members of the group went to St George's Cathedral in Jerusalem for Evening Prayer.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Jehan Titelouze - Urbs Jerusalem.

The Writing on the Wall (2)

Excellent day spent with Maggi Dawn at St Margaret's Barking today exploring the multiple layers of meaning opened up by the interaction between the Arts and the Bible. Click here for a summary of the material Maggi took us through; all linked to the theme of her most recent book, The Writing on the Wall.

This was a day for exploring connections and intereptations rememberiung that the Arts do more than simply decorate, illustrate or communicate Biblical narrative as part of the engagement between the two. Our differing responses to the images we viewed and the poetry we read reminded us both of the multiple layers of meaning contained in Bible stories and artwork which explore such stories and also the differing perspectives that we bring to our interpretations of these stories and artworks.

One image which generated a range of responses illustrating the essential ambiguity of art to which viewers return repeatedly was Banksy's Christ with Shopping Bags, which could provoke reflection on the religion of consumerism, the death of consumerism, the commercialisation of Christianity, and the gift that is Christ, among other possibilities. Maggi noted that good art produced by non-believing artists is better than poor art produced by believing artists. This is, I think, because good art contains the ambiguity which derives from multi-layered meaning whereas poor art functions only at the levels of decoration, illustration or communication.

Through the works we explored, we saw that there is an ongoing dialogue between the Biblical text, its influences and interpretations through artworks and other cultural influences, and the way in which each artwork that we encounter which derive from or make use of Biblical stories or images then affect our responses to those same stories and images when we next read/see them.

A particularly interesting insight from Maggi came in reflecting on Igor Mitoraj's The Annunciation door at Santa Maria degli Angeli e Martiri in Rome which strips the traditional imagery back to the barest minimum and fragments and truncates the protagonist's bodies. Gabriel's wing contains a face which can only fully be seen when the viewer looks at Gabriel from the perspective of Mary. My recollection is of Maggi reflecting that one possible interpretation could be that God's messenger's do not simply bring a message about God but, because God is the content of the message which they bring, also bring God himself. In this instance then the medium and the message were one.

Other fascinating material included a sustained reflection on the life of Abraham based primarily on the Andrei Rublev's Icon of the Trinity and Caravaggio's The Sacrifice of Isaac.

One overall reflection for me was the sense that much of the Bible leaves great scope for imagination because, unlike a novel or contemporary biography, it does not give detailed descriptions or explanations of character's contexts, emotions or thought processes. This then enables artists and readers alike to imagine what these may have been for themselves, as in the marvellous Annunciation poem from Noel Rowe's Magnificat sequence.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Franz Biebl - Ave Maria.

Street Art

The Herbert Art Gallery and Museum in one  of my favourite Galleries to visit and fully deserving of its Best Family Friendly Museum in Britain Award in the Guardian Family Friendly Awards 2010. The Herbert is a light, open contemporary building which shows current temporary exhibitions combined with an excellent collection of post 1900 British Art.

Currently it is the first venue to host a brand new touring exhibition from the Victoria and Albert Museum - Street Art: Contemporary Prints from the V&A. Street art is a diverse, constantly evolving art form, one that moves across the derelict buildings, bus shelters and hoardings of cities around the world. Its roots lie in history, echoing cave paintings and stencilled slogans and images in political campaigning.

The exhibition showcases the work of some of the biggest artists in the street art community such as Banksy, Shepard Fairey, Sickboy, Pure Evil and D*Face. One fascinating aspect of the exhibition is the sense of morality on show through images satirising consumerism and politics, contemplating morality, and questioning rampant individualism.

The Herbert is also particularly good at supplementing the core theme of its main exhibition with other displays and events designed for further exploration of its theme. On this occasion it has commissioned six emerging artists on the UK street scene to decorate its white walls. This  part of the exhibition, Fresh Paint, contains brand new work from Pahnl, SPQR, Lucy McLauchlan, Ben Slow, AsOne and Newso.

While each of these pieces have real strengths I was particularly taken with the faces and branches on the painted cardboard and wood construction which McLauchlan had fitted into a corner of the exhibition as an organic offshoot. McLauchlan combines art deco, psychedelic and childlike motifs to make pieces that are delicate and tender yet engaging and provocative. She hails from Birmingham and I later realised that I had already glimpsed one of her murals returning last Tuesday from seeing Spamalot at the Alex in Birmingham.

To explore another aspect of the street art scene, the Herbert is also showcasing new aerosol art from another Birmingham based graffiti artist, Mohammed Ali. Ali calls his art, AerosolArabic, a unique fusion of urban graffiti art with traditional Arabic Islamic calligraphy and has been working with graffiti in the West Midlands for over fifteen years.

It was after his new-found passion and rediscovery of his faith in Islam, that he began to fuse his graffiti-art with the grace and eloquence of sacred and Islamic script and patterns. He describes his work as, 'taking the best of both worlds.' and bringing back to the forefront principles that are gradually fading away from our modern societies.

He was drawn to the graffiti world from early 80's inspired by the subway art movement, and like many kids living in the UK was involved with the street-painting scene. After studying Multimedia Design at university, he went onto working in the computer-games industry as a designer but soon enough he became disillusioned with using his creative skills for commercial benefit and began creating art for 'mankind's sake'. Graffiti was often a self-glorification of one's identity, the 'tag' being the focus. Mohammed began exploring simple messages which at their heart were words which pointed other than to the 'self'; words with a deeper message that were speaking to the public, and relevant to the wider society.

His art is a unique fusion and celebration of street-art with Arabic Islamic script and patterns. This exhibition includes work on spray painted canvas, video projections and brand new aerosol art along the themes of Freedom, Justice and Equality. Ali has also been pioneering a unique amalgamation of different mediums and artforms - weaving together spoken-word with spraypainted words - and delivering them at auditoriums and public spaces across the UK. At the Herbert, he performed in collaboration with renowned UK spoken-word artists, David J, Indigo Williams and ZK The Poet.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Mohammed Ali - Breaking Down The Walls.