Gants Hill Art Project (1)

This post is the first in a new series undertaken in collaboration with Fr. Benjamin Wallis, Vicar of St Georges Barkingside. Our project involves photographing and painting the Gants Hill area on a roughly monthly basis during the period of its current regeneration. My photographs will be posted here and our work will also be displayed at St Georges.

There is an open invitation to others to join us and our approach involves conversations with any local people known to us or showing interest in what we are doing while out and about photographing and painting the area.

Today was our first sortie into the area and took in the contrasts of the Gants Hill roundabout and Valentines Park.

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Energy Orchard - Hard Street.

Serpentine & Westbourne Grove

I met up with Alan Stewart on Monday at the Serpentine Gallery for one of our periodic sessions comparing notes on our respective ministries while taking in some art. It was also an opportunity for me to firm up my input to the Everyday Icons day which Alan has been involved in organising.

We began with a coffee under the sinuous and mesmeric Serpentine Pavilion 2009 which provided the opportunity for some great 'Windows on the world' photos (which will feature in coming weeks) and the more descriptive photos above.

From the Serpentine, we walked through Notting Hill to Westbourne Grove where we saw Chair Poetics at England & Co and an exhibition of works from the School of Paris at Hanina Fine Arts.

Ralph Ball and Maxine Naylor use design as a critical, visual discourse to communicate ideas about design, culture and society today. In Chair Poetics ordinary, everyday chairs are reconfigured to ask questions about our relationship to utility, familiarity, obsolescence, sustainability and value. While interesting in their own right, the reconfigured chairs, to my mind, had greater aesthetic values in the photographs that Ball and Naylor had taken of them than in their battered and broken reality.

Hanina Fine Arts write of the School of Paris that:

"From the concentration of radical thought in Paris, after the second World War, a new generation of artists emerged, known as the Jeune École de Paris. These artists came from all over Europe and the vibrant and provocative nature of their work reflected the turmoil of civilisation and sought a renewal of language and aesthetics that would provide expression and orientation to the loss of faith in traditional values within post-war society."

These are artists that in terms of art history are not well known because they pursued abstraction after the Art World's interest had moved on from that movement to the next and subsequent movements. This does not mean though that their explorations of the potential of abstraction were without value making this an exhibition of surprises from artists about which I had read very little. I particularly enjoyed the thick brush strokes of Claude Vernard into which he scraped patterns and over which he splayed lines of pure paint.

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Fleet Foxes - Your Protector.

MU Craft Evening

Writing with icing

Glass painting


Sugar moulding

Card making

Watercolour painting

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Duke Special - Portrait.

Windows on the world (71)

Walthamstow, 2009

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Switchfoot - Meant To Live.

c4m webpage update (22)

This week on the commission4mission webpage there is a report on the latest meeting of the Faith & Image group (on the theme of Buddhist Art) together information about the next commission4mission exhibition at All Saints Goodmayes as part of their Festival Weekend. The Goodmayes Festival weekend also features some excellent music and will be well worth checking out, as will the other event highlighted this week, the annual 'Big Draw' event at St Marys Woodford.

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Lifehouse - Everything.

Salty Gospel Reflection

My latest Gospel Reflection for the Mission in London's Economy website can be found by clicking here. In it I ask the question, 'What does it mean to be a Christian at work or in society?', and suggest that Jesus' teaching about being like salt provides an answer.

My reflection ends with the following prayer activity taken from Gerard Kelly's Humanifesto: “Take a handful of salt. Rough-grained sea-salt is best, but the refined variety will do. Hold the salt in your hand as you reflect on its power: to preserve from rot, and to bring out the many flavours of food. Ask God to show you how your humanity can be made ‘salty’ in its role on the earth.”

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Shawn McDonald - Pour Out.

Spiritual Life column

Here is the 'Spiritual Life' column that I have written for the current edition of the Ilford Recorder:

St Johns Seven Kings has just produced a new biannual newsletter about the community activities and events happening in the St John's Centre. More than 300 local people each week attend activities organised by a wide range of community groups including, among others, AA, Brownies, Contact Centre, Downshall Pre-School Playgroup, Kumon Maths, Shine Dance School and Slimming World. We have just organised a well-attended Table-Top Sale, are about to host a Coffee Morning with Redbridge Library Services and, over our Patronal Festival weekend at the beginning of October, will be organising a concert, film showing/takeaway event, and a barn dance. Our members are also actively involved in community groups such as the Redbridge Night Shelter, Redbridge Voluntary Care, Seven Kings & Newbury Park Resident's Association and TASK.

St Johns is by no means unique among churches in the range and significance of our community involvements. Earlier this year a report by Tearfund called ‘In the Thick of It’ described the role that local churches are taking around the world in meeting local community needs. Their report pulled together a substantial body of evidence highlighting the value of faith-based organisations in addressing development needs by presenting anecdotal as well as empirical evidence of the contribution that local churches make to the lives of communities. The report states that, as just one example, the Church of England contributes more than 23 million hours of voluntary service per annum.

Churches do this because we are seeking to follow in the footsteps of Jesus, who laid down his life for those who were both his friends and his enemies. On the night before he died he explicitly took on the role of a servant and washed his disciples feet before telling them to do the same for others. Churches have always provided many kinds of community service as a direct result of wanting to follow the example set by Jesus.

These practical contributions to community life often go unremarked by others but if churches were not involved in their local communities then much that is provided through the voluntary sector would not happen. Politicians and secularists sometimes question why faith groups should receive public money for community activities and facilities. The answer is right under their noses, if they were only to look for it. Without the community work of the churches and of other faith groups, the voluntary sector and all it provides would be seriously diminished.



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Moby - In This World.