On the third day I finish my work

Here's the sermon that I shared this morning at St Catherine’s Wickford and Christ Church Wickford:

The singer-songwriter Bill Fay died recently aged 81. A very private man, he rarely performed in public, but his songs nevertheless touched the hearts of many people.

This was despite a long period, from the mid-1970s to the 2000s, where he was without a recording contract. Such setbacks didn't seem to phase him and he found other work while continuing to record his songs. Eventually, the strength of his early work, which had been overlooked at the time, brought attention back to him and he recorded three well-received albums before he died.

His life mirrored the faith and belief that he poured out in his songs. Songs which are laments for the violence and lack of care often seen in our world together with celebration of the everyday acts of love and care undertaken by ordinary people. The latter reveal God's love in the midst of difficulty and point towards a future day when love will reshape the world in the image of Jesus Christ.

In today's Gospel reading (Luke 13:31-35), Jesus, himself, is facing the forces of violence as Herod is seeking to kill him in the context of a conquered nation ruled by the Roman oppressors. His response is to continue working in the face of the threats around him and to lament the effect the oppressive forces have on the people around him.

He longs to gather those around him and shelter them from the storms of life as a mother hen does with her chicks by bringing them under her wing for warmth. In this way, he shows us the mother heart of God, which is overflowing with love towards us. Lovingly, Jesus is saying he wants to be like the mother hen gathering God’s people to him where they will then experience safety and love. At the same time that he makes this specific statement to the people of Jerusalem, he is also paying a wonderful tribute to motherhood itself by equating the love which God shows towards us to the love that mothers show towards their offspring.

This is one of several passages in scripture where God is described in feminine terms. Given the patriarchal nature of the society in which the Bible was formed, it is surprising to find any references to God as feminine and it is particularly significant to find this reference on the lips of Jesus.

The Bible tells us that God is Spirit and therefore not male or female. When human beings enter the story of creation, it is as beings made in the image of God, both male and female. So, God is ultimately not gendered in the way that we are and it is important for us to understand and celebrate the way God expresses his love through both genders.

Jesus laments here over the patterns of response in our world which see those who are different from us and have a message of change being scapegoated and killed. Scapegoating others is the way in which we consistently act as human beings. We desire something that is possessed by someone else and become disturbed through our longing for what we don’t have. We resolve our disturbance by creating a scapegoat of the person or people who appear to have or prevent us from having what it is we desire. When the scapegoat is killed, we can gain what we desire and also release the sense of disturbance that we feel.

That is what Jesus knew he was facing and his response was to double down on his work of healing and care until such time as his death came when the people would then say 'Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.’

That change would come about because on the third day his work would be finished; the third day being the day he rose from the dead. The scapegoating and crucifixion of God is the ultimate demonstration of God's love for humanity but it is the resurrection that then changes the arc of human history away from oppression and towards peace. Jesus is resurrected as the first-fruits of a new way of life wholly characterised by love and where there is no more mourning or crying or pain.

In rising from the dead, he has gone ahead of us into the new risen body and existence that we shall experience in future when Jesus returns to this earth to fully bring God’s Kingdom into existence here. When Jesus walked the earth, he looked ahead to that future time when the Kingdom of God will be made perfect, and all suffering will come to an end. But he also announced that, because of him, there is a sense in which that Kingdom has already begun. When he healed sick people and brought good news to the poor it was a sign that the Kingdom had come. In the same way, when he overcame death by rising from the dead he became the first fruits of the Kingdom, an example of what we will all become in future.

All of this is also to be found in the songs of Bill Fay. In ‘There is a valley’ he sings:

“There is a hill near Jerusalem that wild flowers grow upon
Flowers don't speak, but they speak to each other of a crucifixion
Just because he said he was the son of God
And the fury of the moment they felt they could only silently look upon
Every city bar brawl, every fist-fight, every bullet from a gun
It's written upon the palms of the Holy One
Every city bar brawl, every fist-fight, every bullet from a gun
It's written in the palms, in the palms of the Holy One”

In ‘Still some light’ he encourages us to go on in the face of this world’s troubles because we have seen the light:

“Still some light for this frail mankind, still some hope, some end in sight
Still some light for this frail mankind, still some grace in troubled times
When this world seems like a market place, where souls are bought and sold
And it’s all to easy, for a soul to grow cold
When this world seems like a market place, where souls are bought and sold
God knows it ain’t easy, don’t give up on it all, still some light”

The light that we have seen is ‘The Healing Day’ that is still to come:

“It'll be okay
On the healing day
No more goin' astray
On the healing day
Yeah we'll find our way
On the healing day
To where the children play
On the healing day

When the tyrant is bound
And the tortured freed from his pain
And the lofty brought to the ground
And the lonely rage

Ain't so far away
That healin' day
Comin' to stay
The healing day”

In the face of violence and oppression, Jesus doubled down on his ministry of healing and his acts of love and transformation. Following in Jesus' footsteps, Bill Fay continued to sing of this world's transformation into the image of Christ despite being ignored and overlooked for many years. In a changing world where hatred of others is on the rise and where authoritarian figures are increasingly being given power to oppress, we are challenged by their examples to continue to act in the ways of love as a sign of the coming kingdom of love. May it be so for each one of us. Amen.

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Bill Fay - Still Some Light.

Coming alive to the Spirit

Here's the reflection I shared during today's lunchtime Eucharist for St Martin-in-the-Fields:

Yesterday, in the Inspired to Follow group, we were looking at an early Florentine image of God as creator depicted as an elderly white man with a long beard, which led us into a discussion as whether God is more accurately depicted as abstract essence, rather than a person with a gender and ethnicity.

Those two strands of thought can also be found here, too, in the distinction Jesus makes between flesh and Spirit (John 3. 1-8). His description of Spirit as being like the wind makes it clear that he is making a distinction between what is tangible, visible and known – the flesh – and what is intangible, invisible and unknown – the Spirit. It is easy to hear that distinction being made and assume that Jesus is saying there is a dualistic division between flesh and Spirit and we have to choose one over the other. Many people in the history of the Church have made just that assumption.

Yet that is to forgot the way in which John’s Gospel begins; ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God … And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth’ (John 1.1, 14), Through the incarnation of Jesus, flesh and Spirit are united and made one. Jesus came into the world to unify flesh and Spirit, to show that the human and the divine can be held together and combined in one; the divine can be human and the human divine.

God was revealed in our humanity in order that we recognise divinity – the image of God - within us. That is what we see here in the distinction between our first birth from our mothers’ womb through which we begin to have experience of the tangible, the visible and the known, and a second birth through water and the Spirit by means of which we begin to acknowledge and recognise our experience of the intangible, the invisible and the unknown. Both are life experiences; the first is immediately apparent to us through our physical birth; the second is an awareness that has to be awakened in us – an awakening that comes unpredictably in line with the unpredictable movements of the Spirit, which blows where it chooses.

The distinctions made by Jesus in the Gospel of John between flesh and Spirit, below and above, darkness and light etc can help, however, in understanding what it is in us that prevents our coming alive to the Spirit. Stephen Verney, in his wonderful commentary of John’s Gospel called ‘Water into Wine,’ say that, when he makes these distinctions, Jesus is speaking about two different levels or orders to reality. What he means by this are different patterns of society, each with a different centre or ruling power. In the first, ‘the ruling principle is the dictator ME, my ego-centric ego, and the pattern of society is people competing with, manipulating and trying to control each other.’ In the second, ‘the ruling principle is the Spirit of Love, and the pattern of society is one of compassion – people giving to each other what they really are, and accepting what others are, recognising their differences, and sharing their vulnerability.’

These two orders or patterns for society are at war with each other and we are caught up in the struggle that results. Choosing our side in this struggle is a key question for us as human beings, the question being ‘so urgent that our survival depends on finding the answer.’ Verney writes that: ‘we can see in our world order the terrible consequences of our ego-centricity. We have projected it into our institutions, where it has swollen up into a positive force of evil. We are all imprisoned together, in a system of competing nation states, on the edge of a catastrophe which could destroy all life on our planet.’ He was writing in the 1980s, but could have been describing today’s nationalism.

It is that ego-centricity and self-centredness which prevents us from coming alive to the Spirit. It is a pre-condition of coming alive to the Spirit that we look away from ourselves in order to see God and others. Beyond this, there is a degree of unpredictability in our awakening to the Spirit which means that we may only be able to tell our personal stories of coming alive to that which is invisible, intangible and beyond our comprehension.

Here is my personal story of resurrection in the form of a meditation. I wonder what features in your story?

When I stand in snow on a mountain slope viewing a cobalt lake,
I come alive.
When the morning mist forms a white sea on the Somerset levels, islanding trees,
I come alive.
When my daughter nestles up and hugs me tight,
I come alive.
When my wife and I lie, skin touching, sweat mingling in the heat of summer and passion,
I come alive.
When a friend listens with understanding and without advising,
I come alive.
When I sing and dance in the echoes of an empty Church,
I come alive.
When words cannot express Your praise and I sing in tongues,
I come alive.
When I hear the rustle of angel’s wings above me in the eaves,
I come alive.

I come alive to endurance
when I see a hesitant smile form on the face of the Big Issue seller.
I come alive to pain
when I hear a friend’s story of depression and unanswered pleading.
I come alive to patience
when I see a husband answer again the question from his alzheimered wife.
I come alive to injustice
when the Metro contrasts Big Mac obesity lawsuits with African famine victims.
I come alive to suffering
when I see Sutherland’s Crucifixion and read Endo’s Silence.
I come alive to grief
when I remember the aircraft shattered and scattered across Kosovan heights.

I come alive
when I am touched and see and hear
the beautiful or broken, the passionate or poor.
The mystery or madness
of the Other in which God
meets and greets me
and calls forth the response
that is love.

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King's X - It's Love.

Exploring aspects of faith and popular music

This week I'll be exploring aspects of faith and popular music firstly in Bread for the World at St Martin-in-the-Fields (6.30pm, Wednesday) when  I will talk about the Spirit and popular music. Then, at CenSAMM's conference Apocalypse in Art: The Creative Unveiling, where I will talk about the apocalypse as a theme in the music of Bob Dylan.

The word ‘apocalypse’ originally indicated an ‘unveiling’, and the speaker in the Book of Revelation is a ‘seer’. This is perhaps one of the reasons that this ancient text (and others like it) have generated such a ferment of creative responses in the visual arts – as well as those other non-visual strands of the arts which have their own way of engaging our mind’s eye.

The rich variety of types of artistic unveiling (visual, musical, dramatic, literary) makes an engagement with the creative arts a deeply valuable way of understanding and appreciating the idea of apocalypse, alongside more traditionally academic modes of enquiry.

This conference seeks to explore our relationship to art, its practice, its study and what the arts unveil to us. As artists or as audiences of art we can be profoundly transformed by our encounters with artistic creativity; indeed, we can find ourselves using the language of revelation to describe such encounters, regardless of our individual faith, religion or beliefs. Mark Rothko is quoted as saying, “the people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them.”

Bob Dylan grew up with the apocalyptic imagery of the Hebrew Scriptures and the cold war experience of hiding under school desks in the era of nuclear threat. When he began composing and performing, he combined this apocalyptic angst with the hobo lifestyle of his hero Woody Guthrie. His songs embody the idea and experience of journeying in the face of the coming apocalypse. In the best of Dylan’s songs we encounter a contemporary Pilgrim, Dante or Rimbaud on a compassionate journey, undertaken in the eye of the Apocalypse, to stand with the damned at the heart of the darkness that is twentieth century culture. Dylan's manifesto is 'A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall'. In this song he walks through a surreal and unjust world, seeing ahead a gathering apocalyptic storm, and resolves to walk in the shadow of the storm and sing out what he sees. From ‘Slow Train Coming’ onwards Dylan equated the apocalypse with the imminent return of Christ (also known as the Second Coming). The return of Christ in judgement is the slow train that is coming around the bend and in the face of this apocalypse he calls on human beings to wake up and strengthen the things that remain. Yet, for much of his career, while consistently writing in the face of a coming apocalypse, Dylan did not specifically equate that apocalypse with the imminent return of Christ. Apocalyptic change in Dylan's work can be understood as generational conflict, Cold War conflicts, nuclear holocaust, Civil Rights struggles, and more. The generic message is that apocalyptic change is coming and we need to think where we stand in relation to it. That message is as relevant today in terms of economic meltdown, climate change or peak oil, as to the Second Coming, whether imminent or not.

For both these talks I will be drawing on my co-authored book 'The Secret Chord'.

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Bob Dylan - Blood In My Eyes.

Artlyst: St James Piccadilly - a series of innovative and provocative art installations

For my latest article for Artlyst I visited St James Piccadilly and saw work by Clinton Chaloner, Arabella Dorman and Emily Young:

'St James Piccadilly is one of the best loved churches in London. The congregation describe themselves as seeking to be inclusive, welcoming and adventurous, while their Rector, Revd Lucy Winkett, Chaplain to the Royal Academy of Arts, suggests that the ‘ungovernable and wholly independent spiritual reality that Christians call God, the generative presence that underpins the universe is the same spirit that inspires and invigorates the artist inside all of us who will not be told what to do or what to believe and who treasures our most precious human characteristic; imagination.’

As a result, it is no surprise to find the Arts as a significant contributor to the ministry which is undertaken in and from St James’ or to find that it has been the location for a series of innovative and provocative art installations, often during the major Christian festivals. I visited recently to see their latest installation, Suspension by Arabella Dorman, but their commitment to visual art is such that it was also possible to see the rawest set of nativity figures I have ever viewed and eight massive masterfully mysterious stone heads by Emily Young.'

My other Artlyst articles are:

• 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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Luke Sital Singh - 21st Century Heartbeat.

Joseph Cornell: Aesthetic experience as a manifestation of spirit

'From a basement in New York, Joseph Cornell channelled his limitless imagination into some of the most original art of the 20th century.' 

'Wanderlust at the RA brings together 80 of Cornell’s most remarkable boxes, assemblages, collages and films, some never before seen outside the USA. Entirely self-taught, the independence of Cornell’s creative voice won the admiration of artists from Marcel Duchamp and the Surrealists, to Robert Motherwell and the Abstract Expressionists, with echoes of his work felt in Pop and Minimalist art.

Wanderlust is a long overdue celebration of an incomparable artist, a man the New York Times called “a poet of light; an architect of memory-fractured rooms and a connoisseur of stars, celestial and otherwise.”'

When he was in his twenties, Joseph Cornell learned about Christian Science and became a devout follower of the religion, as he believed it had cured him of recurring stomach ailments.

Richard Vine notes that 'the teachings of Christian Science and membership of the Christian Science church "provided Cornell ... with a clarity essential to his sanity and his art - the certainty, despite everyday trials and confusions, of ultimate cosmic harmony within the all-encompassing Mind of God."'

Sandra Leonard Starr writes that Cornell 'begins with the finite reality of the object, proves the unreality of it and our seeing it as such, and arrives at a statement of aesthetic experience as a manifestation of spirit.'

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Al Green - How Great Thou Art.

In my sounds I try to uphold a beam of light

"Music is the most powerful of all the muses, since it reaches the divine most easily. Yes, music is an abstraction, but sounds are able to express the spirit. That cannot be expressed in words. All around me the flesh is spoken about, but I want to shout: Where is the spirit, the soul? Souls are as overgrown as the jungle. That is why in my sounds I try to uphold a beam of light."

Pēteris Vasks

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Pēteris Vasks - Credo.

'maybe the most transgressive thing a rock band could do is to serve the Eucharist'

'Because in a secular age, transcendence is transgression. To write songs that yearn for something more – not in a vague, pie-in-the-sky way, but in a sacramental, earthy, no-ideas-but-in-things way – is to transgress the spirit of the times which demands there is no such thing as spirit.'

Joel Heng Hartse is writing in Christ and Pop Culture about Luxury, a band with three members - Lee Bozeman, and his guitarist and brother James Bozeman, and the band’s bassist, Chris Foley - who are all Orthodox priests. Luxury are '(a) a sincere, wounded rock band who sing about sex, death, and decadence, and also (b) a group of mostly bearded men who largely spend their time performing liturgies, administering sacraments, and providing pastoral care.'

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All Things Bright & Beautiful - The Transfiguration, pt.1.

You can’t have faith if you think you know what’s true

Some very sane views expressed here by Alan Sparhawk of Low:

"Everything should make you feel closer to God, but music tends to be a particularly good conduit."

"Music in general has been the fiber of my faith from the beginning.  Everything I know about God was taught to me in songs & the spiritual milestones of my life have almost always been musical experiences. I think the process of writing songs has helped me learn to listen to the spirit, which then testifies of Christ & His Father."

"Music & art give us license to say, “What if everything you thought was true was actually a lie?!!”  It let’s you dream.  You can’t have faith if you think you know what’s true."

"The world of music, especially rock ‘n’ roll, is filled with religious people - the best kind - the ones who just do good things & don’t fly a flag."

"I think a person can address/express their deepest darkest fears in a way that brings light & redemption. It’s part of telling the truth.  Sometimes a prayer is ugly, but God still wants to hear it."

"I’m not an intentional writer. Ideas come usually in fragments & I’m left to fit them together, sometimes having to consciously fill in empty parts.  I’ve learned to trust what comes to you."

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Low - Holy Ghost. 

The Mother heart of God

“Jerusalem, Jerusalem ... how many times I wanted to put my arms around all your people, just as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you would not let me!” (Luke 13. 34)

In this statement of his love for the people of Jerusalem, Jesus speaks of his concern and love for Jerusalem being typified by a mother hen gathering together all her chicks under her wing for safety and warmth. Lovingly, Jesus is saying he wants to be like the mother hen gathering God’s people to him where they will then experience safety and love. At the same time that he makes this specific statement to the people of Jerusalem, he is also paying a wonderful tribute to motherhood itself by equating the love which God shows towards us to the love that mothers show towards their offspring.

We tend to think most readily of God as a father but there are several places in scripture where God’s love is described as being like that of mother for her children.

Hannah Whitall Smith wrote “My children have been the joy of my life. I cannot imagine more exquisite bliss than comes to one sometimes in the possession and companionship of a child. To me there have been moments, when my arms have been around my children, that have seemed more like what the bliss of heaven must be than any other thing I can conceive of; and I think this feeling has taught me more of what  God’s feelings towards his children are than anything else in the universe. If I, a human being with limited capacity, can find such joy in my children, what must God, with his infinite heart of love, feel towards his; In fact most of my ideas of the love and goodness of God have come from my own experience as a mother, because I could not conceive that God would create me with a greater capacity for unselfishness and self-sacrifice than He possessed Himself; and since this discovery of the mother heart of God I have always been able to answer every doubt that may have arisen in my mind, as to the extent and quality of the love of God, by simply looking at my own feelings as a mother.”

Hannah Whitall Smith lived in the United States in the 1850’s. She was born into a Quaker family but later became a Wesleyan preacher and was one of the inspirations behind the Keswick Convention. She wrote those words about the mother heart of God after reading Isaiah 66. 12 – 13, another passage of scripture in which God’s love for all people is described as being like a mother’s love for her children:  "The Lord says, “You will be like a child that is nursed by its mother, carried in her arms, and treated with love. I will comfort you in Jerusalem, as a mother comforts her child.”

Jesus’ focus was on the safety that mothers’ seek to provide for their children out of love. Here, the focus is on the sense of comfort that the child receives from the love of its mother, particularly as it is nursed and fed. Isaiah also used motherly imagery in reference to God in Chapter 49. 15 where the focus is on the faithfulness of a mother’s love:

“The Lord answers,

“Can a woman forget her own baby
    and not love the child she bore?
Even if a mother should forget her child,
    I will never forget you.”

Nancy Hicks picks up on imagery around nursing the child when she writes about Psalm 131:

“Nursing was one of the most intimate acts I have ever been allowed to participate in, and what joy to be utterly depended upon! But a nursing baby is a demanding baby, “Pick me up NOW! Feed me NOW!” And when she fell asleep in my arms I felt needed, but not really appreciated for anything other than my capacity to satisfy hunger.

Then she was weaned. Now, when she crawled into my lap it was for relationship and comfort and intimacy. I understood God’s delight at the psalmist’s words, “Surely I have composed and quieted my soul; like a weaned child rests against his mother, my soul is like a weaned child within me.”

In Psalm 131, the Psalmist pictures himself having the kind of intimacy with God that a weaned child has as it cuddles up on its mother’s lap. That intimacy comes after the child has been fed and has moved on from milk to solid food.

So, the picture that we gain from all these descriptions is of God’s love as the love of a mother for her child is that of God wanting to bring us into a place where we feel safe alongside her, where we know the comfort of being fed and therefore grow from the basics of the faith (the milk) to the depths of the faith (the solid food).

Do you experience the love of God in these ways? Have you thought, like Hannah Whitall Smith, that if we can find deep joy in our children, what must God, with his infinite heart of love, feel towards us? God loves you like a mother loves her child. As we pray and study the scriptures during Lent, God wants to take us into a deeper relationship with him and at the heart of that relationship is his infinite heart of love beating with the kind of love which mother’s commonly show towards their children. May we open up our lives and hearts to receive that love and enter in to that depth of relationship!

There are two final points it is worth us noting. As we have already said, we commonly speak about God as male and yet the scriptures do use, as we have seen, female imagery of God. Interestingly, not just in terms of the mother heart of God, but wisdom and Spirit in particular are often feminine terms. This is of real significance in understanding that women and men are valued equally by God and were created by God to be equal.

Secondly, all talk about God as male and female, Father or Mother, is ultimately only descriptive language. God is always more than any label or image we use to help us understand him. Ultimately, God is Spirit and neither exclusively male or female. It is great to think of God as a loving Father or a loving Mother because those images help us understand and grasp something of the reality and significance of his love but God’s love is always greater and deeper than the love that we have experienced even from the most loving of parents.

It is that depth of love into which God wishes to draw us. So I say again, As we pray and study the scriptures during Lent, God wants to take us into that deeper relationship and at the heart of that relationship is an infinite heart of love beating with the kind of love which mother’s commonly show towards their children. May we open up our lives and hearts to receive that love and enter in to that depth of relationship!

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Larry Norman - Strong Love, Strange Peace.

Reaching Beyond

Today I visited the Reaching Beyond exhibition at Bow Road Methodist Church and met Richard Smith, one of the artists and organisers.

Reaching Beyond is an exhibition celebrating the human spirit reaching beyond the mundane both through endeavour and an openness to something transcendent. The exhibition's title is intentionally open to a wide range of interpretation and the work shown by the 19 artists included invites those who see it to think afresh, and reach beyond their assumptions. The range of media and styles featured is also correspondingly broad with fabrics, icons, mosaics, paintings and sculptures all included. The recent renovation of the church makes it, among other things, an excellent exhibition space. The sculptures set on the exterior provide an arresting beginning to the show and certainly drew other visitors  into the building over the course of my visit.

Richard Smith is one half of Smith and Moore (the other being David Moore). The pair have been friends and colleagues since 1966, and have been creating sculptures together since 1994. In their art they explore/question/challenge serious matters with humour, levity and a touch of incredulity. They bring to this their experience of living and working within poor communities, political and social engagement, and reflection on theology. David is a Methodist minister and runs Colloquy, an art and theology project which is part of the Methodist Church, from which the idea for the exhibition grew. Richard has had a varied career, ranging from research in physical chemistry to community development and management, with illustrating having been taken in along the way.

From early 2012 Smith and Moore sent their small, sturdy sculpture, the Visitor, on an uncharted journey via churches and other organisations through five London boroughs (Greenwich, Hackney, Newham, Tower Hamlets and Waltham Forest). People seeing the Visitor on its journey sent in photographs and notes of what happen, all of which are posted on the project's website and have been used in the exhibition along with the Visitor itself.

Other particularly strong work in the exhibition includes: Aaron Distler's abstract ‘Fire Drawings’ (using paper which has been treated and burnt to create extraordinary effects contained within frames which are themselves part of the work); Robert Koenig's monumental wood figures symbolising the artist’s ancestors as part of a search for ancestral and sculptural roots; Jean Lamb, an Anglican Priest living in Nottingham, who is a woodcarver in the storytelling tradition and is showing two casts from Stations of the Holocaust which follow the path of Christ to the Cross, each one including in the background images from the record of the Jewish holocaust during the Second World War; and Santiago Bell, a brilliant artist, educator, political activist and thinker imprisoned and tortured by the Pinochet regime in the 1970s, who expressed his insights and reflected on his experience in finely carved, imaginative, wooden constructions, such as Age of Emptiness.

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After The Fire - Joy.