Spiritual power and sensitive engagement that define pilgrimage

Alys Tomlinson has been named Photographer of the Year in the 2018 Sony World Photography Awards for her series Ex-Voto.

Tomlinson says:

'‘Ex-Voto’ is an extension of my previous work in Lourdes. Still intrigued by this place of great spiritual contemplation and worship, I re-visited the project with a different approach. Shooting in large format black and white slowed the process down and gave me space to think. Using anthropological experience gained during my MA, I became interested in the markers left behind at pilgrimage sites. Placed anonymously and often hidden from view, ‘Ex-Votos’ are offerings left by pilgrims as signs of gratitude and devotion, creating a tangible narrative between faith, person and the landscape. Taken at the pilgrimage sites of Lourdes (France), Ballyvourney (Ireland) and Grabarka (Poland), the project encompasses formal portraiture, large format landscape and small, detailed still-lifes of the objects and markers left behind.'

'Mike Trow, the chair of the judges and former picture editor for British Vogue, said: “Alys Tomlinson is a worthy overall winner for telling a story so beautifully, quietly, and yet with a spiritual power that spoke of her sensitive engagement with the subjects and places that help define pilgrimage.”'

The 2018 Sony World Photography Awards Exhibition is at Somerset House until 6 May and features inspirational works by more than 600 artists, the exhibition showcases winning and shortlisted works from the 2018 Sony World Photography Awards, the world’s most diverse photography competition. Curated by Trow, the images are specially selected from a record-breaking number of submissions. The 2018 Awards cover a wide variety of genres, from architecture to landscape, street photography to wildlife, portraiture to travel.

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Karl Jenkins - Benedictus.

Exhibitions update

Zi Ling's watercolour entitled 'Tea' is in Figurative Art Now, the Columbia Threadneedle Prize exhibition, at Mall Galleries which showcases the very best in new figurative and representational art. This year many of the works selected for this exhibition will go on tour to Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, the city’s largest temporary exhibition space, for a special four-week exhibition opening in July 2016. Ling's watercolour work 'Cigarette Break' (2015) has been selected for the Lynn Painter-Stainers Prize 2016. This exhibition will take place at the Mall Galleries from 7th to 13th March. Ling creates portraits or explorations of relationships by working from photographs with which she feels an intuitive connection.

Working in collaboration with Counterpoints Arts, Ben Uri’s latest exhibition, Unexpected, continues their exploration of the themes of identity and migration, emphasising a wide-ranging contemporary response. Following on from their centenary exhibition, Out of Chaos, held last autumn at Somerset House, the exhibition returns them to their principal location at Boundary Road, NW8. 

Works by Ben Uri artists including Frank Auerbach, Eva Frankfurther, Julie Held and Josef Herman will be shown alongside those by invited artists – all from migrant backgrounds – across a range of disciplines and media. This includes paintings by Tam Joseph and Eugene Palmer; drawings by Behjat Omer Abdulla; sculpture and installations by Ana Cvorovic, Joyce Kalema, Jasleen Kaur, Fokowan George Kelly and Zory Shahrokhi; photography by Güler Ates, James Russell Cant, Juan del Gado and former Community Partners Oxford House; textiles by Salah ud Din; an audio-visual piece by Jessica Marlowe and an HLF commissioned film responding to Out of Chaos by Edwin Mingard. 

Both individually and collectively, the featured works touch on themes of journeys, displacement, loss, memory and identity, evoking powerful and sometimes unexpected juxtapositions and responses.

CNB is presenting Britannic Myths, the gallery’s second solo show by the acclaimed British artist Joe Machine. The twelve paintings that make up the exhibition have been created in collaboration with the academic and writer Dr Steven O’Brien, and are based on a dialogue around his soon to be published book, Britannia Stories.

Britannia Stories explores twenty myths. While all of these are commonly associated with the British Isles, many originate from other civilisations, countries and cultures, and were adopted – and adapted – as a consequence of invasion and conquest. The two men worked closely in examining the origins of all the stories, and on determining the relevance of each to the 21st century, with Machine’s paintings influencing O’Brien’s writings, and vice versa.

Says Machine: ‘The power of the stories lies not so much as folk tales from isolated islands, but in their universal connection to ancient cultures. These dialogues with the divine, and struggles of the human spirit are timeless, and show us how myths are as important today as they ever were.’ 

Joe Machine's next exhibition will be at St Stephen Walbrook in May.

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Kate Bush - The Sensual World.

Out of Chaos; Ben Uri: 100 Years in London

Tomorrow is the final opportunity to see Out of Chaos; Ben Uri: 100 Years in London at the Inigo Rooms in the East Wing of Somerset House.

This exhibition explores one hundred years of émigré history with masterpieces from our art collection, looking to forge future conversations about the relationship between immigration and art. The story begins on 1 July 1915 in London’s East End when Russian-Jewish émigré Lazar Berson and like-minded local artists and craftsmen formed a society to nurture art and creativity. For the next 100 years, it’s a story of art, identity and migration and an art collection of 1,300 artworks that need a new home.

A registered charity and museum, Ben Uri is the only specialist art museum in Europe addressing universal and ever-more central issues of identity and migration through the visual arts. Emerging from and representing the Jewish community, their collection principally reflects the work, lives and contribution of British and European artists of Jewish descent, interpreted within the wider context of twentieth and twenty-first century art history, politics and society.

Visit the centenary website www.BenUri100.org to explore an online gallery, discover archives, watch films, read blogs, uncover the work of community partners and find out about visiting the exhibition in Somerset House.

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Leonard Cohen - You Got Me Singing.

Speaking in tongues

Art Below's Stations of the Cross exhibition at Marylebone Parish Church may be over but Paul Benney's 'Speaking in Tongues' and ‘St. Jude Thaddeus’ from his 12 Apostle series remain on display through May 2015.

The subjects of 'Speaking in Tongues' are all friends and contemporaries of the artist, and are depicted as the Apostles with Pentecostal flames hovering above them. The reflective surface allows the viewer to appear to be part of the group in an extraordinary and thought-provoking way. Benney's depiction of light emanating from the head as an animation of the spirit has echoes in the imagery of many different religions and is a particular fascination for Benney. 

'Speaking in Tongues' follows on thematically from the major exhibition of Benney's widely publicised show Night Paintings at Somerset House, where he is an artist-in-residence. The work brings together Benney's talents as both a contemporary artist and one of the UK's most celebrated portrait painters.

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Talking Heads - This Must Be The Place.

Heaven in a hell of war

"An epic series of large-scale murals, by the acclaimed war artist Sir Stanley Spencer” have recently left “their permanent home at the National Trust’s Sandham Memorial Chapel to be exhibited at Somerset House ...” in London. “The pictures are leaving their permanent home for a few months while a major conservation project takes place at the chapel.”

“Built to honour the 'forgotten dead' of the First World War, who were not remembered on any official memorials, the series was inspired by Spencer’s own experiences as a medical orderly and soldier on the Salonika front, and is peppered with personal and unexpected details. The paintings took six years to complete in all, and are considered by many to be the artist’s finest achievement, drawing such praise as 'Britain’s answer to the Sistine Chapel'.”

“Spencer painted scenes of his own wartime experiences, as a hospital orderly in Bristol and as a soldier, also on the Salonika front.  His recollections, painted entirely from memory, focus on the domestic rather than combative and evoke everyday experience – washing lockers, inspecting kit, sorting laundry, scrubbing floors and taking tea – in which he found spiritual resonance and sustenance ... 

the paintings ... describe the banal daily life that, to those from the battlefield, represented a ‘heaven in a hell of war.’ For Spencer, the menial became the miraculous; a form of reconciliation.” 

The scheme is dominated by a “Resurrection scene behind the altar, in which dozens of British soldiers lay the white wooden crosses that marked their graves at the feet of a distant Christ.” 

“Painted on canvas adhered to the wall of the high altar at Sandham,” the 'Resurrection' took Spencer nearly a year to complete. “It dominates the Chapel and all the other scenes are subordinate too it. The picture is a reminder of the relationship between war, death and Christianity, not merely a convenient and familiar religious image behind the altar. The composition is based on a complex pattern of wooden crosses which was suggested to Spencer by his habit of squaring up the canvas in order to work out the design. As a living soldier hands in his rifle at the end of service, so a dead soldier carries his cross to Christ, who is seen in the middle distance receiving these crosses. Spencer's idea was that the cross produces a different reaction in everybody;” so we see these crosses serving as an object of devotion; ... or marking a grave from which a soldier emerges; or framing a bewildered face. “This is Spencer’s vision of the end of war, in which heaven has emerged from hell.”

So, Spencer gives us two versions of heaven in a hell of war. The first, the mundane acts of service that people do for each other, while the second is the new life that we receive in Christ following our resurrection from the dead. The first is, in some ways, a taster for the second.  

Our readings today (Job 19. 23 - 27 and Luke 20. 27 - 38) focus on the second of these, the resurrection from the dead, but, before thinking about that briefly, I would like to think a little about the first.

Earlier this week I talked about Jesus’ words to his disciples, spoken shortly before his own death, in which he said they had been chosen and appointed to bear fruit – fruit that will last (John 15. 16). The fruit that he was talking about was his characteristics of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, humility, and self-control. Christlike behaviour and actions he said lasts or endures. Similarly, St Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 13 that actions which are based on faith, hope and love remain. The word he used for remain hints that such actions continue beyond the grave into eternity i.e. that we can take something with us when we die, that the fruit or acts of faith, hope and love grown in this life continue into, and continue to bear fruit in, the next.  

So there is a connection here between the two things which Stanley Spencer described as being heavenly; acts of loving service in the here and now and our future resurrected life in eternity. I was speaking at a meeting of our local Scriptural Reasoning group where groups of Christians, Jews and Muslims come to discuss their scriptures together. Enabling that kind of sharing to take place is also an act of loving service and is a significant part of what the fighting in World War II was to achieve by the ending of the Holocaust. It is seen also in the leading of today’s Civic Service of Remembrance being shared, as it is each year, by the Padres of the Royal British Legion and AJEX (the Association of Jewish Ex-Servicemen and Women).

Poppies were one of the few flowers able to survive in areas severely damaged by fighting. The flowering of poppies from seeds which germinated in the mud of the World War I battlefields (and Flanders, in particular) became a symbol of hope on the battlefields, and after the war it became associated with Remembrance, a sign of life continuing after the horrors of conflict.

As Christians, we believe that we will grow into new life through death because of Jesus. Jesus was a seed sown into our world which died and was buried only to live again. As Paul puts it in 1 Corinthians 15, “the truth is that Christ has been raised from death, as the guarantee that those who sleep in death will also be raised.” The tomb therefore becomes a womb, a place of new birth, not just for Jesus but, through Jesus, for each one of us as well.

St Paul writes that, “This image of planting a dead seed and raising a live plant is a mere sketch at best, but perhaps it will help in approaching the mystery of the resurrection body — but only if you keep in mind that when we’re raised, we’re raised for good, alive forever! The corpse that’s planted is no beauty, but when it’s raised, it’s glorious. Put in the ground weak, it comes up powerful. The seed sown is natural; the seed grown is supernatural — same seed, same body, but what a difference from when it goes down in physical mortality to when it is raised up in spiritual immortality!”

This new resurrection life is different from this life Jesus says, in it we will not marry but will live like angels and never die. Yet, as Job said, we will still inhabit recognisable bodies but will see our Redeemer with our own eyes and will know that he is not a stranger to us.

Stanley Spencer painted a vision of that future life in his Resurrection of the Soldiers. The resurrection life is different from this life because the soldiers are leaving war behind – handing in their rifles to Christ as these are no longer required – and contemplating with devotion the cross on which he died for their salvation.

Their acts of loving service – washing lockers, inspecting kit, sorting laundry, scrubbing floors and taking tea – have not been left behind however; as they look out from their scene of resurrection it is these things that they see in the Chapel before them.

It will be the same for us - our acts of faith, hope and love will continue to be with us in our resurrected future – and this can be a source of inspiration and encouragement to us as we seek to bear fruit for Christ in the here and now by living Christlike lives; lives which are characterised by love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, humility, and self-control.   

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The Priests - Abide with me.