Sabbatical art pilgrimage: St Alban's Romford

St Alban,Protomartyr, Romford has been transformed from a modest suburban church into a place of beauty and excellence that can be seen as a centre for significant works of Ecclesiastical Art. Father Roderick Hingley, the Parish Priest who has led this transformation, believes the visual arts are “a great vehicle for communicating the Christian Gospel,” thinks that we are living through an exciting period in Ecclesiastical Art and, therefore, encourages others to be bold, creative and adventurous in the commissioning of original art.

Fr. Hingley’s work at St Alban began with a major re-ordering of the church from 1992-1995 which removed the cluttered and over-furnished interior that he found on arrival. This work laid a foundation on which it has been possible to build well in excess of 20 separate commissions leading to twenty-one Diocesan Advisory Committee Design Awards. Among the most significant of these are fifteen Stations of the Cross by Charles Gurrey, a Christus Rex by Peter Eugene Ball, seven stained glass windows by Patrick Reyntiens and a chancel ceiling mural by Mark Cazalet.

Gurrey’s Stations are carved in European Oak with their irregular sizes governed by each individual design. They speak with an eloquent minimalism; each piece focussing on a detail from the station and stimulating the viewers imagination to picture the fuller scene. Christ’s face remains unseen until the final resurrection station.            

The Christus Rex at St Alban is the first that Ball has carved of Christ as Supreme and Eternal High Priest. This Christ, gilded with red and gold and clothed with chasuble and stole, springs forth from the brick wall to embrace and bless the congregation below. Cazalet, on first coming into St Alban, was struck by the visual link between this golden Christ and the rich colours of Reyntien’s sanctuary stained glass. 

Reyntien's helped redefine the medium of stained glass through his collaborations with John Piper. Among their numerous ecclesiastical and secular commissions in Britain and USA were the iconic Baptistery Window at Coventry Cathedral and their 'Crown of Glass' at Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral. On his own Reyntiens has also made windows from Washington DC to Southwell Minster and his work has been an inspiration to contemporary glass art workers. It was his windows at Southwell Minister - as here, filled with angels - which encouraged Fr Hingley to approach him regarding work at St Alban's. 

Here, five angelic windows fill the sanctuary with light and movement, their colours washing over the stone altar and steps. The central three angels hold the crucifix, host and chalice while the north and south angels are less dense in colour to allow for a greater play of light on the altar and echo each other in their interplay of rose and fire imagery combined with words from Mother Julian and T.S. Eliot.

Cazalet then further linked the Angel windows with the Christus Rex through a mural covering the chancel ceiling and depicting the angels of the four elements of creation: air, fire, earth and water. Mirroring the church’s transition from the variegated blues of its baptistery window to its light-filled sanctuary, Cazalet’s mural moves from the dark blue of the winter night to the light and yellows of the summer sun. The light touch of this work extends to Cazalet’s humorous angels soaring above and engaging with the sights and sounds of Romford including its commuters, shoppers, clubbers and parishioners.

Fr. Hingley has a significant involvement in the schools of the parish and groups of schoolchildren often visit the church. Many of the commissions at St Albans have been made with children in mind, including Cazalet’s mural. Hingley’s community links have also been a major source of support in raising funds for the many commissions. In addition to the support of the schools, funds have also been raised by church members and local businesses (Hingley has been Chaplain to the local Chamber of Commerce) and through bequests and grants (including a major award from the Jerusalem Trust for the Cazalet mural).  

As a result, these commissions have given the parish a 'beyond-the-parish ministry' in that other parishes considering commissions are regularly recommended to visit St Alban's in order to see what has been achieved, be inspired, gain ideas and be put in touch with artists. Visits also come as a result of the parish participating in borough-based Open House and Art Trail events as well as school visits. As Chairman of Governors and Link-Governor for Art and Design at The Frances Bardsley School for Girls, Fr. Hingley has played a significant role in the development of the School as a centre of excellence for the Arts including the Brentwood Road Gallery and commissions at the School by Reyntiens and Cazalet. This engagement, which has led to the School joining the Chelmsford Diocesan Board of Education Affiliated Schools Scheme, enables the School, Parish and Diocese to "support each other in the spirit of Christian fellowship and service" finding "innovative ways of working together and learning from one another." One outcome is the inclusion of artworks by students which will feature in the church as part of its forthcoming Fan the Flame mission week.

At St Alban, Protomartyr, Romford, a rather dull traditional church building has been made to sing by becoming a treasure house filled with high quality and varied works of art; all in the context of a church aspiring to do all it does as well as it possibly can. Most churches which have significant commissions have accumulated their holdings over many years and through the ministry of many priests. It is a rare and special achievement to re-order and re-fit an entire church within the ministry of one parish priest and to do so with such a degree of attention to both quality and mission.

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Igor Stravinsky - Symphony Of Psalms.  

Drawing the Line / Days and Rites

commission4mission member Mark Lewis has recently completed the Drawing the Line exhibition at the School of Jewellery in Birmingham. The exhibition represented the current output of an ongoing drawing and mark-making project in the form of a series of weekly visual diaries. These sketchbook journals are a response to the urban and rural landscape observed on Mark’s train journey which is undertaken every week from London Marylebone to Birmingham Snow Hill (and vice versa) on the Chiltern Mainline. This attempt to build up a different form of visual intimacy with a continually changing landscape viewed in all directions began over two years ago. The project has challenged the relationship between visual perception and mark-making and encouraged new ways of seeing which are essential when working spontaneously under self-imposed pressure.

The exhibition presented all of the visual diaries in both original and digitised forms. Each sketchbook journal is an unedited response to a section of the urban and rural landscape observed on Mark's journey and attempts to capture a sense of place through immediate felt response, memory and cumulative knowledge. Every journey has prompted a different way of engaging with the surrounding landscape. Some sequences are overlaid with responses from subsequent journeys; others are worked up later from recalled fragments, while more recent series are semi-abstractions generated almost totally from memory. Earlier figurative studies have gradually given way to the use of visual metaphors capturing landscape gestures, hidden structures, energies and patterns.

The sketchbooks embody a series of changing seasonal narratives that attempt to establish a sense of place through immediate felt response, memory and cumulative knowledge. While the earlier books were consistently figurative in character others have given way to the use of visual metaphors capturing landscape gestures, hidden structures, energies and patterns. Mark’s working methods are expressed through an extensive range of graphical media and drawing strategies including the recent use of an iPad.

These unedited visual narratives are representations or ‘visual cues’, which have the potential to tease out the truth of a landscape and may take on a greater reality than the actual perceived surroundings. The later minimalist approaches become a ‘distillation of realness’ suggesting that ‘less’ really is ‘more’. 

Mark is an industrial designer specialising in product design, jewellery and silversmithing. He has taught drawing and design in adult, further and higher education for 30 years. Formerly a principal lecturer in the Sir John Cass Department of Art Media and Design at London Metropolitan university, he is currently lecturing part-time at BIAD, Birmingham and the Goldsmiths Centre in London. Drawing has always been central to his creative practice and he is currently pursuing personal projects which focus on gestural drawing and mark-making.

Mark has also recently become an author as his book entitled Days and Rites: Popular customs of the Church has been published by the Heart of Albion Press:

"People go to church to worship and, as is often quipped, to be 'hatched, matched and dispatched'. Yet these quintessential rites have been adapted in all sorts of ways by parishioners and clergy up and down the country, while a great number of 'blessings' and other services that are quite specific to individual churches are performed annually. Collectively, they create a rich variety of traditions, many of which are only known about locally.

Some of these liturgical traditions have survived unbroken over many centuries, others have been revived after a break during the twentieth century – while yet more continue to be invented. Some of these more recent traditions – such as Harvest Festivals and Christingle – are now so ubiquitous that many churchgoers are unaware of a time when they were not part of the yearly cycle of customs.

By drawing together, for the first time, detailed information about these popular customs of the church, Mark Lewis hopes to stimulate further interest, research and recording of these remarkable events."

A Holy Water Stoup designed by Mark and commissioned from commission4mission for St Margaret’s Great Ilford has been awarded a ‘Commended’ certificate in the annual Design Awards of the Diocesan Advisory Committee for the Diocese of Chelmsford.  The judges commented on 'the simple and elegant design' of the Holy Water Stoup which they said 'has been well crafted.' Mark has explained that the design of the Holy Water Stoup, which is made from oiled oak and polished brass, 'is inspired by a rising and opening hand in a gesture that suggests invitation or something offered and given in love, reflecting the mission of the Church.'

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Paul Mealor - A Spotless Rose.

Appropriate public thanksgiving?

The exhibition of Mexican miracle paintings at the Wellcome Collection (Infinitas Gracias) got me reflecting on the differences between Latin Catholic expressions of faith and those of Western Protestantism.
Usually commissioned from local artists by the petitioner, votive paintings tell immediate and intensely personal stories, from domestic dramas to revolutionary violence, through which a markedly human history of communities and their culture can be read. The votives are intimate records of the tumultuous dramas of everyday life - lightning strikes, gunfights, motor accidents, ill-health and false imprisonment - in which saintly intervention was believed to have led to survival and reprieve.

Votives are gestures of thanksgiving, examples of public gratitude for survival, something that we don't do well in the Western Church where public memorials are either reserved for the wealthy or are controversial when they reflect popular culture. Thousands of these small paintings line the walls of Mexican churches. This, again, would seem to be something that we value in other cultures but which consider as anathema in our own Western churches where minimalism rules and the naïve is undervalued.

The regulations governing churchyards and churches (including the otherwise excellent new guidelines from the Church Buildings Council) would seem to specifically exclude from our churches any local expression of the type of art which is being celebrated through Infinitas Gracias. It may be worth the CBC, DACs and other bodies concerned with the upkeep of churchyards and churches to consider how they would respond to requests for naïve or folk art should these arise.

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Bob Dylan - Senor (Tales Of Yankee Power).