Artlyst: A Belonging Project And Exiles Loss and Displacement

My latest article for Artlyst explores connections between A Belonging Project and Matilde Damele's Exiles series. Exiles will be at St Stephen Walbrook from 16-24 September, while A Belonging Project has recently shown work by Elizabeth Kwant and Micah Purnell, with more work to be shown at St Ann's Manchester shortly:

'Screenprints on black plastic bin bags, screenprints of migrants on bold backgrounds painted with house paints named after the positivity and stability they are not afforded, birdcages housing a variety of found and bought objects questioning the freedom consumerism appears to offer, and flags recording the number of detainees at Detention Removal Centres; all exhibited in churches or Cathedrals in London and Manchester. These church-located installations all explore the limits and boundaries, forming our understanding and practices of belonging.'

My other Artlyst articles and interviews are:

• Robert Polidori: Fra Angelico Opus Operantis
• Art, Faith, Church Patronage and Modernity
• Contemplating the Spiritual in Contemporary Art
• Mat Collishaw Challenges Faith Perspectives With Ushaw Installation
• Waterloo Festival Launches At St. John’s Waterloo
• John Bellany Alan Davie Spiritual Joy and Magic
• RIFT Unites 17 Art and Science MA Graduates At Central St Martins
• Visionary Cities: Michael Takeo Magruder – British Library
• Van Gogh’s Religious Journey Around London
• William Congdon Holy Sites And The Kettle’s Yard Connection
• Mark Dean Premieres Pastiche Mass At Banqueting Hall Chelsea College of Arts
• John Kirby: The Torment Underlying The Civilised Facade
• Curating Spiritual Sensibilities In Changing Times
• Ken Currie: Protest Defeat And Victory
• Bosco Sodi: A Moment Of Genesis
• Bill Viola And The Art Of Contemplation
• Art In Churches 2018: Spiritual Combinations Explored
• Sister Wendy Beckett – A Reminiscence
• Marleen Hengelaar-Rookmaaker On The Legacy Of ArtWay
• Guido Guidi: Per Strada Flowers Gallery London
• Peter Howson Artlyst Interview
• Peter Howson: The play is over – Flowers Gallery
• Camille Henrot: Scientific History And Creation Story Mash Up
• Nicola Green Explores Recent And Contemporary Religious Leaders – St Martin-in-the-Fields
• Art And The Consequences Of War Explored In Two Exhibitions
• Helaine Blumenfeld Translating Her Vision
• Alastair Gordon A Testament To His Faith
• Sacred Noise: Explores Religion, Faith And Divinity
• Bill Viola: Quiet Contemplative Video Installation St Cuthbert’s Church Edinburgh
• The ground-breaking work of Sister Corita Kent
• Katrina Moss Chaiya Art Awards Interview: Where is God in our 21st century world?
• Picasso To Souza: The Crucifixion Imagery Rarely Exhibited
• Apocalypse Now: Michael Takeo Magruder Interviewed
• Jonathan Anderson: Religious Inspirations Behind Modernism
• Michael Takeo Magruder: De / coding the Apocalypse – Panacea Museum
• Giorgio Griffa: The Golden Ratio And Inexplicable Knowledge
• Arabella Dorman Unveils New Installation At St James Church Piccadilly
• Can Art Transform Society?
• Art Awakening Humanity Conference Report
• Central St Martins in the Fields Design Then And Now
• The Sacramental And Liturgical Nature Of Conceptual Art
• Caravan – An Interview With Rev Paul Gordon Chandler On Arts Peacebuilding
• Art Awakening Humanity Alexander de Cadenet Interviewed
• Polish Art In Britain Centenary Marked At London’s Ben Uri Gallery
• Michael Pendry New Installation Lights Up St Martin In The Fields;
• Mark Dean Projects Stations of the Cross Videos On Henry Moore Altar;
• Refugee Artists Learning from The Lives Of Others;
• The Religious Impulses Of Robert Rauschenberg;
• The Christian Science Connection Within The British Modern Art Movement;
• Artists Rebranding The Christmas Tree Tradition;
• Art Impacted - A Radical Response To Radicalisation;
• The Art of St Martin-in-the-Fields; and
• Was Caravaggio A Good Christian?

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Barratt Band - Bad Mean World..

Bread for the World: Leaves for Healing

Here's my reflection from last night's Bread for the World at St Martin-in-the-Fields, which took the 'Leaves for Healing' exhibition as its theme:

Ezekiel 47 is a vision of a transformed desert landscape with transformation beginning in the temple; a place where God’s presence was very real, an intersecting point of heaven and earth.

God’s presence in the Temple is the source of new life, seen as water flowing out and into the landscape, transforming the barren, empty desert into incredibly fertile land. Geographically Jerusalem (the location of the temple) is on very high ground and the Dead Sea is below sea level, meaning water can only flow into it. The water becomes stagnant and unsuitable for drinking or watering plants. So the vision here of life giving water, flowing into stagnant waters, turning it into fresh water and generating swarms of life, would have fired the imaginations of those who first heard these words.

The description of trees and fruit and flowing rivers evokes the creation story and suggests God is renewing and recreating the land, fulfilling his original creation purpose. Both sides of the river produce all kinds of trees for food and remarkably these trees are so fertile they produce fruit every month because of the incredible life flowing from the temple. The passage finishes with a wonderful vision of the fruit from these trees being food and the leaves used for healing.

This vision of life being released into the dry desert of Ezekiel’s time has fired the imaginations of the artists and craftspeople’s group at St Martin’s and encouraged us to imagine this life flowing into our 21st century context. The result has been the ‘Leaves for Healing’ exhibition in the foyer of the Crypt which began in Lent with Part 1 of the exhibition and is continuing now in Eastertide with Part 2 of the exhibition. Having the exhibition in two halves has enabled us to reflect the transition in the passage from wilderness to fertile land and to explore that transition in relation to Lent and Eastertide.

Some of the artists in the group took the opportunity this passage provides to begin the exhibition with an artwork that reflected wilderness and then transform that same artwork to reflect change, fertility and growth. Among the works that do so are pieces by Lois Bentley, Ruth Hutchison, Jonathan Kearney, Ali Lyon and Sarah Sikorski.

Lois created personal photographic collages on triangular pieces of sheet steel. In the first half of the exhibition she hung the three triangular steel sheets strung out in a line alongside each other with the points of each triangle facing down. In this configuration, which she called ‘Three hanging,’ they reminded us of the three crosses on Calvary, the central triangle showing imagery related to its title, ‘Bruised’. For the second part of the exhibition Lois has re-shaped and re-organised the piece. It is now called ‘Re-United’ and the principal change is that she has hung the middle triangle point upwards to indicate that Jesus’ work on the cross is finished and the Trinity are restored to their coherent whole. She says that she was inspired to do this by Jesus asking Peter for the third time - do you love me?

Ruth Hutchison’s first piece was called ‘Grieving for my Garden’ and reflected the sense of loss Ruth felt at no longer having ‘a beautiful garden with lots of everything including barbeques, family gatherings and places just to sit quietly, listen to trees blowing in the wind while the blackbird sings.’ Her garden had been a context for her creativity. Now art has become the outlet for her creativity. Following her passion for recycling, all her art materials are recycled from skips, charity shops and from friends, keeping in line with the theme of ‘your rubbish is my treasure’. Using these recycled materials her piece in the second part of the exhibition is entitled ‘The Barbeque’ and expresses in a different form the pleasure that she once found in the barbeques held in her garden. Her art enables her to express grief at her loss and also to express past pleasures in new forms.

Jonathan Kearney has prepared an abstract piece printed in colours that evoke the differing emotions of Lent and Eastertide. The first piece is sombre colours was called ‘Anticipation,’ while the second with more vibrant colouring is entitled ‘New Week.’

Ali Lyon’s piece is called ‘Down in the River to Pray’ and is made of hand-dyed fabric in deepening shades of blue, with some salt embellishment. Her piece follows the image of deepening water, the trees on the banks, and the salty water. The shores of plain green were unadorned for Lent and now, for Eastertide, are blossoming with a variety of hand-stitched leaves.

This is such a marvellously evocative passage using so much natural imagery – water, rivers, sea, swamps, marshes, fish, trees, fruit, leaves etc. – that our artists have been able to explore its imagery from a variety of very different perspectives. I’ve just given a taster tonight; an introduction that doesn’t refer to the majority of the pieces or the artists. Clearly, the best way to appreciate the exhibition is to view it yourself and to take time with each of the pieces in turn. The second best way to appreciate is to hear from the artists themselves and so Sarah Sikorski is now going to show us the two pieces she made for the exhibition and tell us a little about them.

Sarah told us briefly about screenprinting and the beauty of using repetition in imagery. The title of Sarah's Lenten piece, When the river empties into the Sea, the water there becomes fresh, is from Ezekiel 47 v 8. The theme of the work is pollution of the seas with plastic. The design is inspired by Tapa bark cloth made by indigenous peoples of the Pacific islands, in particular Tonga. Ancient rock paintings of fish from caves in the Northern Territories of Australia were another influence, as was the patterns found in the plastics in the oceans, and on our beaches. The Lenten question considered by the piece is about our need for fresh living water. Her current piece, Leaves for Healing, uses repeated imagery of leaves and incorporates the phrase: 'Every month the leaves with bear, because the water for them flows from the sanctuary. Their fruit will be for food, and their leaves for healing.'

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Rush - The Trees.

Connections of Sister Corita Kent and Norman Nicholson

Tracing the connections between artists that were either part of the Church and were engaged by the Church in the 20th century is an important element in the argument that the level and extent of the engagement between the Church and the Arts has been more significant that is generally acknowledged. Some of my posts tracing these connections include:   

• http://joninbetween.blogspot.com/2012/09/airbrushed-from-art-history-update.html
http://joninbetween.blogspot.com/2011/08/beyond-airbrushed-from-art-history.html
• http://joninbetween.blogspot.com/search/label/sabbatical
• http://joninbetween.blogspot.com/2016/06/christianity-and-literature.html
• http://joninbetween.blogspot.com/2017/12/faith-mystery-poetry.html
http://joninbetween.blogspot.com/2016/08/thomas-merton-and-latin-american-poets.html
• http://joninbetween.blogspot.com/2014/01/a-rough-guide-to-christian-art.html
• http://joninbetween.blogspot.com/2014/04/orthodoxy-and-music.html
• http://joninbetween.blogspot.com/2012/04/contemporary-choral-music.html

Most recently, I've been reading about the work and friendships of the US nun Sister Corita Kent and also of the British poet Norman Nicholson:

The Catholic Art Association was founded in 1937 by Sister Esther Newport as an organisation of artists, art educators, and others interested in Catholic art and its philosophy, and created the world into which Sister Corita Mary stepped when she began her career as an inspirational artist and teacher at Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles in 1945.

'Much of Kent’s artistic activism came out of her close friendship with Father Daniel Berrigan, a Jesuit priest best known for his radical antiwar activism. Kent and Berrigan carried on an extensive correspondence and collaborated on a number of projects. She designed the covers for many of Berrigan’s books, including The Trial of the Catonsville Nine (Beacon Press, 1970), his free-verse play about his trial and conviction for burning draft files with napalm at the Catonsville, Maryland, draft board in 1968. Berrigan penned the introduction for Kent’s book Footnotes and Headlines, and she used both his published writings and personal letters in numerous prints.'

Her screenprint "Powerup" (1965) 'melds a sermon on spiritual fulfillment by an activist priest, Daniel Berrigan, with the advertising catch-phrase of the Richfield Oil Corporation.'

'“An Evening with God” which took place at the Boston Tea Party, a rock music club, and featured performances, music, conversation, and an informal communion meal of store-bought bread and wine' was 'an event planned by Kent, the priest Daniel Berrigan, the musician Judy Collins, and the Harvard professor Harvey Cox.'

Berrigan said of Kent, "She introduces the intuitive, the unpredictable into religion, and thereby threatens the essentially masculine, terribly efficient, chancery-ridden, law-abiding, file-cabinet church."

Berrigan was part of a 'colorful cast of friends and associates who shared both with him, or crossed his path.' 'Think Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, Thich Nhat Hanh, Martin Luther King, Ernesto Cardenal, and Martin Sheen, to list the best known.'

Norman Nicholson 'was always an active and enthusiastic member of a vibrant and close-knit nationwide web which interlinked the leading writers and artists of the day. T.S. Eliot was typically this web’s central figure, but other notable participants included E. Martin Browne, Kathleen Raine, Anne Ridler, Ben and Winifred Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, Michael and Janet Roberts, Bro. George Every and very many more.'

Nicholson was published by T. S. Eliot at Faber and Faber, where Anne Ridler was Eliot's secretary. Nicholson was sometimes a weekend guest at Helen Sutherland's house parties, which included writers such as Eliot. 'For a short period, at the beginning of World War II, Norman Nicholson and Kathleen Raine were very close.' 'Kathleen and Norman helped each other with their first collections and the title of Kathleen Raine's - Stone and Flower - is a quote taken from one of Norman's poems. Many of the poems in Norman's second collection - Rock Face - were either written for Kathleen, or came out of their conversations and collaborations.'

The sculptor Josefina de Vasconcellos and her husband Delmar Banner on moving to Cumbria also made friends with Cumbria’s own artistic community, befriending Beatrix Potter and Nicholson.

In An Anthology of Religious Verse, which he edited, Nicholson writes that to ‘many modern poets the events of Our Lord’s life are so vivid that they seem to be contemporary, so that it is natural for them to write in the language, imagery and form of our time.’ The structure of his book deals with modern conceptions of God and of life in relation to God. Poets included are: W.H. Auden, Hilaire Belloc, S.L. Bethell, G.K. Chesterton, Walter de la Mare, Clifford Dyment, T.S. Eliot, George Every, M. Farrow, David Gascoyne, Thomas Hardy, Rayner Heppenstall, G.M. Hopkins, D.H. Lawrence, Andrew Murray, Norman Nicholson, J.D.C. Pellow, Ruth Pitter, Anne Ridler, Michael Roberts, Walter Roberts, John Short, Tambimuttu, Allen Tate, Dylan Thomas, Charles Williams, W.B. Yeats and Andrew Young.

Nicholson contributed to the Christian verse drama revival which began in 1930 when E. Martin Browne was appointed by George Bell, Bishop of Chichester, to be director of religious drama for the diocese. 'One of Browne's early assignments was to organise a pageant, The Rock, to raise funds for the building of Anglican churches. At the request of Bishop Bell, T. S. Eliot wrote a series of choruses linking the loosely historical scenes of the pageant, which was played by amateurs and presented at Sadler's Wells Theatre for a fortnight's run in summer 1934.

After this success, Bell invited Eliot and Browne to work on a play to be written by Eliot and presented at the Canterbury Festival the following year, with Browne as director. The title was Murder in the Cathedral and it was this production that established the collaboration between Eliot as poet-playwright and Martin Browne as director which was to last for twenty years ... It established Browne as the leading director of the "poetic drama" movement, which was then undergoing something of a revival ...

In 1945 Browne took over the 150-seater Mercury Theatre, Notting Hill Gate, and devoted it for the next three years to the production of modern verse plays, with first productions of plays by Christopher Fry, Ronald Duncan, Norman Nicholson and Anne Ridler, all directed by Browne himself.'

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Norman Nicholson - September On The Mosses.

Why does the Church so rarely value and nurture the artists and prophets found in its midst?

Why does the Church so rarely value and nurture the artists and prophets found in its midst? 

That is a question which underlies the exhibition, at Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft, of Corita Kent’s vibrant, passionate, wry, colourful, compassionate, and contextually relevant art. 

Her art generated a string of correspondence from the Archbishop of Los Angeles that placed ever more stringent constraints on her art and teaching. Copies of that correspondence are displayed at the end of this most marvellous of exhibitions, leading me to raise this question in my exhibition review for Church Times:

'A wonderful piece of contextualised mission was brought to a premature end by the Archbishop’s inability to understand, combined with his inability to resist the local voices of complaint. Sister Corita was a true pioneer in, and heroine of, the 20th-century Church. This exhibition cannot be commended too highly.'

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Aaron Rose - Become A Microscope (Extract).

Foyer display: Sarah Sikorski

‘Colour, pattern, print’ by Sarah Sikorski (Two screenprinted linens, 200 cm × 130cm)

St Martin-in-the-Fields is home to several commissions and permanent installations by contemporary artists.

We also have an exciting programme of temporary exhibitions, as well as a group of artists and craftspeople from the St Martin’s community who show artwork and organise art projects on a temporary basis.

One of the initiatives from this group is a changing display of work by the group members. Each month a different member of the group will show an example of their work, so, if you are able, do return to see the changing display.

These pieces by Sarah Sikorski demonstrate the possibilities of screenprinting in terms of colours and patterns.

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Patti Smith - Perfect Day.

The Chip Shop

The Henningham Family Press have created a new show called Chip Shop, featuring a fully functioning mobile screenprinting workshop. "Built from chip-board and replicating a full-size chippy, The Chip Shop is a fully functioning temporary screen printing workshop, serving up words printed on wooden board." All you need to do is to add your favourite word to their catch of the day menu!

A silkscreen print, on chipboard - yours for the price of a bag of chips! Is it really possible? Yes! The Chip Shop will be appearing at least 3 times in March as part of the London Word Festival:

• March 7th Toynbee Arts Bar & Cafe, a FREE event where they will be frying solo.
• March 20th 'Keep Printing and Carry On', Stoke Newington International Airport - an eclectic night of music, mini-lectures, cake, featuring Murray Macaulay doing a Universettee reprise on Sister Corita (the screenprinting nun), Darren Hayman, and more from their good friends, the Universettee.
• March 31st, 'The Art of Storytelling', St. Leonard's Church, where they will be tying up all the loose words printed throughout the festival into another live print with the help of a very special guest poet.

February Festival - in the next couple of weeks they will also be out in public in the form of a stall at the following event: Finsbury Art Festival, Saturday February 27th, 11am - 4pm, St Luke’s Centre, 90 Central Street EC1V 8AJ. Tel: 020 7549 8181.

Their contribution to the Finsbury Art Festival Art Zone will be showing off the pamphlet stitch. For those who like reading as much as fiddling with bits of paper and string, they will be binding some of the contributions from their guest bloggers, David Barnes, Eddie Farrell and Julie Rafalski. Plus one of the stories by David Henningham from Erroneous Disposition of the People. All this and much more, absolutely free! It will be a very child-friendly, as well as adult-friendly event. A fine way to spend a lazy Saturday afternoon.

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Writz - Luxury.