CHRIS GOLLON : STATIONS OF THE CROSS On View at The Church of St. John on Bethnal Green

After a two-year hiatus, The Church of St John on Bethnal Green, designed by Sir John Soane, opens its doors for the Good Friday service. Once again, visitors may view Chris Gollon’s acclaimed Fourteen Stations of the Cross, a fine example of contemporary sacred art.

The Church of St John on Bethnal Green is a Grade I-listed church designed by Sir John Soane from 1826-28, and one of the East End’s most admired buildings. In 2000, Father Alan Green commissioned leading British, and London-born, artist Chris Gollon (1953-2017) to create 14 Stations of the Cross paintings for the church.

The sequence of paintings took eight years to complete. Father Alan Green, as Rector of the church, collaborated with Gollon on the project. Gollon used his son as the model for Jesus, and his daughter as Mary; he cast Father Alan as Nicodemus.

Upon the site-specific artworks’ unveiling – in 2008 on Good Friday – Gollon’s Fourteen Stations of the Cross were blessed by Richard Chartres, Bishop of London, and permanently installed in the church in 2009. They were also chosen as Critic’s Choice in both The Times and the Financial Times, featured on BBC TV News and Chris Gollon was interviewed by Ed Stourton about his Stations for Radio 4’s Today Programme.

Jackie Wullschlager, in the Financial Times, said: “It was a bold, inspired decision of Father Alan Green to commission Chris Gollon.” She noted: “Like [Stanley] Spencer, he dramatizes the everyday in contemporary images, depicting our clumsy, ridiculous ordinariness, bringing alive for a modern audience the ghastly dissonance of this story of good and evil, sacrifice and humanity, answering on its own terms a 21st-century culture that regards the heroic as absurd.”

One painting from Gollon’s Fourteen Stations of the Cross was also shown in Presence: Images of Christ for the Third Millennium in St Pauls Cathedral, alongside works by Bill Viola, Tracey Emin, Maggi Hambling and Craigie Aitchison.

The Church of St John on Bethnal Green will open for the 10am Good Friday service on April 15 2022. Fourteen Stations of the Cross may once more serve both as an aid to worship and as a visitor attraction.

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John Stainer - God So Loved The World.

St John the Baptist Hoxton

Completed in 1826, St John the Baptist Hoxton is a Georgian church in the Classical style and is the only one built to the design of Francis Edwards, Sir John Soane's foremost pupil. The building is a large example of a Commissioners' church, retaining its floor plan intact as well as its galleries and its décor is notable, particularly for its spectacular painted ceiling. It was executed by the prominent architect Joseph Arthur Reeve in the early 20th century.

The urban landscape has been a source of fascination, inspiration and a recurring theme throughout the work of Caroline Nina Phillips. She contemplates what can be seen and the possibilities of what remains unseen. Phillips has loaned the church two of her paintings which have been installed on the east wall of the church. ‘Liminality’ evokes a light drawing us through the darkness of an urban landscape - making us think perhaps of the kingdom of God and the dawning brightness of Christ dispelling all darkness. ‘Occupy’, depicts St Paul’s Cathedral, but you can also make out the murky dome tents of the Occupy protest of 2011 - reminding us of the poor, the marginalised, and that Christ also ‘became flesh and pitched his tent among us’.

After two years studying with men from the Dorset limestone quarries, Mike Chapman opened his own studio in the summer of 1996 and in 2004 held his first solo exhibition at St Martins-in-the-Fields. His work is now in the collections of a number of institutions throughout the UK and in private collections both here and in America. His memorial at St John's Hoxton, located in the Garden of Remembrance, is a hand drawn monolith, carved in an enormous Welsh slate, weighing over a tonne. It marks the site where ashes are placed in the churchyard.

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Mumford and Sons - The Wolf.