Windows on the world (490)

Oxford, 2024

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James MacMillan - Who Shall Separate Us.

 

Oxford: Ervin Bossányi, Nicholas Mynheer, Roger Wagner, James MacMillan

Yesterday, I was in Oxford to see the transformational refurbishment of the ground and lower-ground public areas at Modern Art Oxford and their first exhibition on reopening Belkis Ayón: Sikán Illuminations. While in Oxford, I also visited St Peter's College Chapel, St John's College Chapel, and St Mary the Virgin, Iffley, before attending the Oakeshott Lecture given by Sir James MacMillan at The Sheldonian Theatre.
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Ervin Bossányi (1891-1975) now best known for his stained glass, was an immensely productive and versatile artist. His work, expressed in a language of strong colour and skilful draughtsmanship, speaks of harmony, serenity, and human dignity which tells much about a sensitive artist who shunned publicity and was happiest in the sanctuary of his studio. His life and career were closely interwoven with major upheavals and events in European and world history of the 20th century. Born in Hungary, Bossányi was twice exiled, first in Germany, and then after the rise of National Socialism, in England. The influences upon him crossed cultural divides and continents and were blended into an unmistakable personal style. His artistic achievements range from small personal ornaments, interior decoration and textile designs, to paintings, friezes and stained glass windows in prestigious buildings such as Canterbury Cathedral and Washington National Cathedral in the USA.

At the west end of the south wall of the nave in St Peter's College Chapel is a wonderful window by Bossányi on the theme of ‘In his hands a seed will grow’. It was created as a personal project in 1943 and installed in 1997 as a memorial to the artist and his wife. It sits at eye level, so affording a rare opportunity to get a close-up view of a window by Bossányi executed in his unique style. St Peters College Chapel also has designs Bossányi made for several of his most significant windows including Canterbury Cathedral and Washington National Cathedral. The Ervin Bossányi collection was generously gifted to St Peter’s College by the artist’s estate in 1996. The East window at St Peter's College Chapel is a superb example of John Hayward’s distinctive style with close, cross-hatched leading, brilliant colours, and witty details. Hayward (1929-2007) was one of the foremost stained glass artists of the post-war period.

St John's College Chapel also houses significant pieces of contemporary art. To the right of the altar is a small triptych of The Life of John the Baptist by local artist Nicholas Mynheer, while in the Baylie Chapel is a modern Coptic icon of The Baptism of Jesus, made in Egypt. In the main body of the Chapel are two windows by Bossányi, donated by his son Jo, depicting scenes from the life of St Francis of Assisi.

St. Mary the Virgin in Iffley is a fine example of late Romanesque architecture built in the 1160s by the Clinton family whose castle was at Kenilworth. The complexity of the symbolism throughout the church, including the geometry of the design, suggests educated and pious patrons. The sumptuous sculpted decoration and the quality of the materials brought to the site for the building, including Tournai marble shafts from present day Belgium, demonstrate that the building was designed to make a statement in this world as well as to God. Apart from the early thirteenth century extension at the east end, the church is substantially as originally built. During the last twenty five years, two magnificent windows have been installed in the baptistery, one by John Piper related to Christ’s birth, and the other by Roger Wagner depicting the ‘Flowering Tree’. Wagner and Nicholas Mynheer designed the new font cover and Mynheer also designed the new aumbry to the south of the altar.

 
In the third Oakeshott (formerly Scruton) Lecture of 2024, world-renowned composer and conductor James MacMillan spoke about music and the idea of the sacred, contrasting antiquity with the modern world, reflecting on the relationship between faith and the arts. Following his lecture, Macmillan was joined on stage by the composer and Prior of Blackfriars Dominic White, for a wider discussion.

MacMillan spoke about his appreciation for the writings and ideas of Roger Scruton after whom this series of Lectures was originally named. He spoke about the music that Jesus would have sung at the Last Supper and the links between that style of singing and Gregorian chant. He noted that Gregorian chant has been widely appreciated and studied by composers throughout history, including modern and contemporary composers. He also noted that, although churches in the Western have experienced declining numbers in the modern and contemporary period, composers have, in large numbers, continued to be inspired by religions and the music of religion. Although, as a post-War reaction, many composers eschewed the stirring up of emotions through music, opting for a more abstract style, increasingly composers, including MacMillan himself, have re-embraced emotion in more recent years.

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James MacMillan - Who Shall Separate Us. 

Windows on the world (404)

Oxford, 2017

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Joan Baez - Brothers In Arms.

Windows on the world (403)

Oxford, 2017

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Thea Gilmore - Start As We Mean To Go  On.

Windows on the world (401)

Oxford, 2017

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Midnight Oil - Forgotten Years.

Windows on the world (400)

Oxford, 2017

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Robbie Robertson - Broken Arrow.

Windows on the world (399)

Oxford, 2017

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Low - Gentle.

Windows on the world (294)

Oxford, 2017

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Bruce Cockburn - Stab At Matter.

Windows on the world (393)

Oxford, 2017

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Mavis Staples - The Weight.

Windows on the world (392)

Oxford, 2017

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John Prine - That's How Every Empire Falls.

Dry Room, Inside Job and King Lear

Dry Room is a cross-disciplinary piece about childhood trauma, friendship, and redemption. Following its successful premiere at the World Stage Design Quadrennial 2017, the show will be given its UK premiere at the Brighton Fringe before moving on to the Old Fire Station Oxford. 

This weekend (6 - 8 April), however, the associate film Dry Room is being displayed at Tate Modern in Inside Job, which presents works by 135 employees from Tate Britain, Tate Modern, Tate Liverpool and Tate St Ives, including painting, photography and sculptures. Tonight I was at the PV with Director & Co-Designer, Zi Ling, and Story writer & Producer, Eldarin Yeong.

Ling had a double reason for celebrating tonight as her watercolour King Lear won The Frank Herring Easel Award in her first exhibition as a Candidate Member of the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours. It is her fourth exhibition with the Institute since 2015 and she has four new paintings in the exhibition at Mall Galleries.

In addition to Dry Room, the following are also well worth looking out for at Inside Job: Ed Hadfield's ‘Affirmative 1’; Izna Bandey's ‘There Are No Words’; and Kyriaki Mitsou's 'TETRALOGY: PRAY LOVE TRY HOPE'.  

Inspired by Surrealism art and the Story Stem technique - used by psychologists to study children's inner world, the story of Dry Room follows three adopted children who are the survivors of childhood trauma. Natalie, a victim of child neglect and sexual abuse; Christopher lost his parents in an accident; Jack suffered domestic violence from his alcoholic parents. To escape from their haunting experiences, they embark on a journey of self-discovery and encounter many demons of the past.

Set in a Magritte-styled room, this performance installation gives an intriguing cinematic perspective to a narrative dance, by combining live music and conceptual art. Dry Room is directed and co-designed by Ling and the emerging designer Tong Zhao (Royal Shakespeare Company, Harper's Bazaar 150th Anniversary exhibition, Paris Fashion Week). Live music is played by the talented Spanish experimental cellist Carolina Bartumeu (Royal Albert Hall, Wigmore Hall, Berlin Philharmoniker). Dry Room features Italian minimalist composer Giovanni Sollima's heartbreaking cello solo, Alone, and improvised music by Carolina Bartumeu.

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Giovanni Sollima - Alone.

Windows on the world (387)

Oxford, 2017

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Mark Heard - Dry Bones Dance.

Windows on the world (386)

Oxford, 2017

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George Harrison - Hear Me Lord.

Rose Finn-Kelcey: Life, Belief and Beyond

Life, death and spirituality were recurrent themes in Rose Finn-Kelcey’s work. She had a simple explanation as to why this was so:

“I was brought up in a family that was quite religious. I was sent to a religious school, so it was quite a big part of my life, and it was something I felt ambivalent about but also at the same time very conscious of. So I wanted to explore that: the spiritual located in the ordinary.”

Driven by the twin desires of reinventing herself and responding to specific sites for her work, she moved from performance based work in the early part of her career to installation and object based work in the latter. Thrilling examples from every phase of her diverse body of work can be found at Modern Art Oxford in this, the first posthumous retrospective of Finn-Kelcey’s artistic practice.

At the Gallery entrance is an immediate instance of Finn-Kelcey’s ability to wryly play with the material and the beyond. God Kennel – A Tabernacle makes us look to the heavens by placing a dog’s kennel on the ceiling. This is to play with the reversibility of dog and God in order to question our perceptions of heaven and earth through the inversion and elevation of the lowly.

Our perceptions of God are further explored in Visual Questionnaire, a project undertaken with ordinands in 1996, while a Sargent Fellow at the British School in Rome. She asked Roman Catholic ordinands to provide visual responses to the questions ‘Where does God live?’ and ‘What does God look like?’ 40 sheets of responses are displayed along one long wall with the mix of simple abstract and complex figurative imagery running along a continuum from traditional religious to secular iconography; all serving to demonstrate the impossibility of visualising the infinite. Several of the ordinands found the exercise impossible to contemplate visually and therefore resorted to words instead of images.

Sally O'Reilly wrote of Finn-Kelcey’s Angel, an installation on the exterior of St Paul’s Bow Common (2004), that she seemed to be emphasising the “difficulty of finding the eloquence to voice the unvoicable, the absurdity of evoking the spiritual from the material.” Yet, as Guy Brett has written, Angel, and other of Finn-Kelcey’s religiously themed works, combine irreverence and genuine spiritual longing in order to both debunk and venerate. Her work is therefore mischievous, challenging, ironic and truthful.

In 1999 she contributed an outdoors sculpture for the Millennium Dome’s public walkways. Four customized vending machines (one of which features in this exhibition) dispensed non-denominational prayers with the prayers being animated on illuminated LED display boards, each named after a popular chocolate bar. Finn-Kelcey explained how It Pays to Pray worked:

"Insert 20p and view your prayer. Press 6 for FLYTE and the animated text goes into action: I Need to be Brave, I Want to be Brave, I don't feel Brave, I feel Scared, Scared to Death. Or press 2 for Ripple: I am so Happy, So Very Very Happy, So Happy to be me, Thank you. I am so Happy; Happy, Happy, Happy, So very Happy just to be me. Then press the return button and get your 20p back."

It Pays to Pray dispenses with the priest as intermediary, a critique both of organised religion and of consumerism, while connecting with the reality that, just as we go to a chocolate vending machine when our blood sugar levels are low, we pray when our spiritual levels are low. Finn-Kelcey also demonstrated this reality through a questionnaire compiled for the catalogue of The British Art Show 4 in which she asked artists and critics, ‘Do you pray? If so to whom and for what?’ thereby discovering that some did, primarily when in need. Finn-Kelcey answered her own question by saying she prayed “To God – ‘Thy will be done’ – but please let me know what it is.”

As this retrospective amply demonstrates, Finn-Kelcey combined avant-garde experimentation with socio-political aims and the exploration of life, belief and beyond. She worked in the belief that, by choosing new mediums and making specific things for specific places, she could continue to reinvent herself and remain a perennial beginner. As Guy Brett has noted this means that no “two works of hers are physically alike; each represents a fresh challenge.” Each is essentially a resurrection or rebirth; an approach to life and art from which a Church needing to re-present the Gospel afresh in each generation could potentially learn.

Rose Finn-Kelcey: Life, Belief and Beyond, Modern Art Oxford, until 15 October 2017 - www.modernartoxford.org.uk/

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Jimi Hendrix - Angel.

Windows on the world (357)

Oxford, 2017

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Michael McDermott - Shadow In The Window.

Phil Evens and The Barton Project

Teresa Smith, Kate Coxon and George Smith have written a comprehensive report on The Barton Project which was set up by my father, Phil Evens, in 1974. The Barton Neighbourhood Community Project: Barton, Oxford City and Oxfordshire is published by Oxford Social Research Ltd and the introduction to the report outlines its scope:

'The Barton Neighbourhood Community Project was first established on the Barton estate, Oxford in 1974. The initiative for the project came from a lecturer, Phil Evens, in the University of Oxford’s Department of Social and Administrative Studies (known as ‘Barnett House’) which had a long history of local research and local involvement, and was in the late 1960s and early 1970s closely involved in major national government programmes targeted at disadvantaged areas in the UK. Evens persuaded his Department that they should also support a local initiative and selected the Barton estate as an area that had been neglected (A ‘Forgotten Community’ was the title of his 1976 book). Barton is a small social housing estate on the eastern edge of Oxford city, outside the main city ring road, that cut it off from the rest of the city.

It can be argued that in one form or other the Barton Project has existed ever since, though the University passed on the direct link in the 1990s to Ruskin College when the project’s community work student training unit was transferred; the project’s welfare rights work, Oxfordshire Welfare Rights, is now funded and managed by a local community work agency.

While this report focuses on the community work on Barton now and the current social and economic conditions on the Barton estate, the study also covers some of the changes and developments that have occurred both in the area and in the way community work has operated in disadvantaged areas like the Barton estate.

In the opening section we cover some of the wider background to the development of neighbourhood community work in the UK and analyse the social and economic conditions in the Barton area in comparison to Oxford, Oxfordshire and England as a whole. The second section focuses on the Barton Neighbourhood Project in terms of its development over time and its current programme of work. Further case studies of particular schemes are also covered. Finally we ask whether the Barton Estate is any longer a ‘forgotten community’, and draw out lessons and conclusions that may be relevant to other areas in the UK and elsewhere.'

Dad's experiences and other contributions to the development of community work were published in Community Work: Theory and practice (1974) and The Barton Project (1976). Both books applied his Christian faith to his work, and called for the active involvement of Christians in community work and other public services. My other posts about Dad and his work can be found by clicking here.
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U2 - Bad.

Bob Holman & Phil Evens: Affluence and position as inconsistent with Christian faith

In 1970 my father, Phil Evens, entered social-work education by becoming a lecturer in applied social studies at Oxford University. There, he discovered that he did not fit into the exclusive network of “North Oxbridge Society”, and so he moved nearer to his ideological home and working-class identity by setting up an Applied Action Research Community Work Project in 1973. It was called the Barton Project, after the council estate on which it was based.

His experiences and other contributions to the development of community work were published in Community Work: Theory and practice (1974) and The Barton Project (1976). Both books applied his Christian faith to his work, and called for the active involvement of Christians in community work and other public services.

Similarly in 1976, Bob Holman 'resigned his professorship in social administration at Bath University to become a community worker on the city’s deprived Southdown estate. He saw his affluence and position as inconsistent with his Christian faith. He and his wife, Annette, and their two children, Ruth and David, moved from a comfortable middle-class area in the city to a home next to the estate and he started the project where he then worked.'

In 1976, the Barton Project project lost funding, and my father's job was restructured away. He returned, somewhat disillusioned, to his roots in Somerset, where he became self-employed as a landscape gardener. During this mid-life crisis, he and his family began worshipping for the first time in the C of E, and he continued, as he had done for many years, to set up and run Christian youth clubs. Involvement in wider aspects of Anglican ministry led to his call to train for ordination.

At Trinity College, Bristol, he set up the Voice of the People Trust, to sponsor Christian ministry in urban priority areas through community-work projects linked to parishes. Work on the trust was carried out in conjunction with his ministry, first, as a curate at Aston Parish Church, and then as Vicar of St Edmund’s, Tyesley.

'After a decade in Bath, in 1987 [Bob Holman] went to live and work on the vast and deprived Easterhouse estate in Glasgow. He always wanted to show what could be done to motivate and involve people and bring communities together. Bob spurned any distinction between himself and other residents, calling himself a “resourceful friend”. His daily work involved filling in social security forms, accompany young people to court or helping a neighbour to raise a loan for a new cooker.'

Holman, who died on 15 June, became a regular contributor to the Guardian which published some extracts from his writing following his death:

'I will not lose my Christianity. It came before my socialism. The example and values of Jesus Christ led me to seek a societal implementation through politics. The writings of Richard Tawney and the practices of Keir Hardie and George Lansbury led me into the Labour party. But Christianity is more than politics. It will be with me to the end.'

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Ben Harper & The Innocent Criminals - All That Has Grown.

Modern Art Oxford: Barbara Kruger

Barbara Kruger at Modern Art Oxford until 31 August 2014

'Through ironic appropriation of specific slogans and imagery, Kruger deploys the visual strategies of mass communication in order to challenge the often manipulative logic at work in the language of advertising, television and other media and the role of Western consumerist culture.'

'Kruger’s investigation of rhetoric is further intensified by the work’s loud graphic style of which the artist says “I attempt to investigate the complex inter-relationships between power and society, but as for the visual presentation itself, I try to avoid a high degree of difficulty. I would like for people to be drawn directly in the work.”'

'While the exhibition addresses ideas of value and consumerism, this work also presents a more philosophical trajectory, confronting the viewer with questions and declarations such as, “IS THERE LIFE WITHOUT PAIN?” “IS THAT ALL THERE IS?” and “THE BRUTAL RELENTLESS FEARFUL END OF IT ALL.” The repeated motif of an emoticon – a hallmark of smartphone and social media communication – references the explosion of digital culture across online and mobile platforms and the influence of these technologies on our lives.'

'Kruger’s work is primarily concerned with the machinations of power in contemporary life. Through ironic appropriation of specific slogans and imagery, she deploys the visual strategies of mass media in order to subvert the often manipulative logic at work in the language of advertising, television and other media. Kruger’s use of both declarative statements and the imperative, what she terms ‘direct address’, is a consistent tactic throughout her work. This mode of address is utilised not only to grab the viewer’s attention but also to implicate us in the work’s content, forcing us to confront and question familiar social and cultural orthodoxies.'

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Barbara Kruger at Modern Art Oxford.

Oxford Retreat House

I've had a wonderful couple of days on the retreat that my cell group share annually. There has been so much that we have shared over the years as we journey together, with the continued sense that God is walking with us.

This was the second occasion that our retreat has been at the Oxford Retreat House run by the Disclaced Carmelite Friars. 52 years ago, the Carmelite Order purchased Chilswell House, former home of Poet Laureate Robert Bridges. Since then, a community of Carmelite friars has followed a life of prayer and ministry in the spirit of St Teresa of Avila and St John of the Cross. Their life revolves around the times of liturgical and personal silent prayer each day.

All guests are invited to join in this prayer. The Retreat Centre has recently been

extensively refurbished and welcomes a wide variety of groups. Set in 17 acres of woodland, and overlooking the ‘city of dreaming spires’, the Centre has 27 rooms, 13 of which are twin. The Centre offers preached and guided retreats, as well as weekends on various Carmelite-related themes. The Retreat House is also available for private groups and retreats. We couldn't wish for a better setting for our group retreat.

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Loreena McKennitt - The Dark Night Of The Soul.