Cambridge, 2024
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Judee Sill - The Living EndThe Living End.
Saturday, 15 June 2024
Quiet Day: Faith Pictures
We've had a wonderful Quiet Day today at St Mary's Runwell reflecting on faith journeys and faith pictures. We've been reflecting on key moments in our lives and faith and thinking of ways to picture what we have experienced and learnt. It has been a very moving time for which we thank Gail and Stephen who led us throughout the day. We ended with a Eucharist in which our reflections were offered back to God.
Faith Pictures is a free resource from Church Army to help Christians of all traditions talk about their own story of faith with confidence. Faith Pictures is six sessions long, each one building on the last to help Christians to see where God has been present in their lives, how they can talk about that confidently, and how God is active in the world around us and wants us to join in with Him.
Today, we looked at our own journeys, where and how we have been aware of God, and how we might start to think about the shape of that journey. We also created images that helped sum up our own faith journey.
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The Accompany - Beside The Still Waters.
Thursday, 13 June 2024
Kirby Laing Centre Conference: First Things First
This week I've been at the Kirby Laing Centre Conference in Cambridge.
The Kirby Laing Centre is an academic research centre concerned with public theology we seek to do rigorous scholarship across the disciplines addressing the great issues of our day from a Christian view point. They also seek to foster and nurture Christian scholarship that is rooted in spirituality and practised in community.
The theme for their inaugural conference was First Things First: Spirituality and Public Theology. Our aim at KLC is to accompany the Spirit on his mission, and in order to do this we need continually to attend to our spiritual formation. The journey in – spirituality – opens out to the journey out – our vocations in the world, and both are essential if we are to be salt and light. The conference explored the vital importance of deep spiritual formation for Christian public engagement, and promises thought-provoking key-note presentations, art, music, poetry, book launches, community, and many other avenues of enjoyment of God’s good world. KLC Director Craig Bartholomew gave two keynote addresses on The One Thing Necessary.
The arts track at the Conference was put together by Otto Bam, a musician, writer and researcher born and raised in Bloemfontein, South Africa. He is the Arts Manager for the Kirby Laing Centre for Public Theology and editor of ArtWay.eu.
- Violist Rachel Yonan, who has performed as a soloist and chamber musician in concert halls across the United States, Switzerland, Italy, Austria and China. A lover of chamber music, Rachel co-founded the Marinus Ensemble with her brother, cellist Joseph Kuipers. Marinus aim to allow culture and excellence to reach broader audiences. She spoke on music’s gratuitous beauty in a logocentric world.
- Playwright and author, Murray Watts, gave a lecture on art and spirituality. He has worked in TV, radio, film and theatre, winning awards and critical acclaim.and set up The Wayfarer Trust, a charity which seeks to encourage people from all walks of life to value the arts and to actively support all those striving for excellence and spiritual inspiration in the world of arts and media.
- Fr Dominic White OP is a Dominican friar and priest at Blackfriars, Cambridge. He is the author of The Lost Knowledge of Christ: Contemporary Spiritualities, Christian Cosmology and the Arts (Liturgical Press, 2015), and How Do I Look: Theology in the Age of the Selfie (SCM, 2020). He is also an organist, pianist and composer.
- Roger Henderson led us in celebrating the launch of his and Marleen Hengelaar-Rookmaaker’s new edited volume, The Artistic Sphere, and unveiling the brand-new ArtWay.eu website (which will be online at the end of June), an online arts and faith publication founded by Marleen, which came under KLC’s stewardship in 2023.
- Bishop Graham Kings guided us in thinking about the potential of art for facilitating missional and spiritual encounters, referencing Bulgarian artist Silvia Dimitrova’s paintings of Seven Women of the Bible, which he and his wife commissioned. The series includes Sarah, Miriam, Ruth, Esther, Magdalene, Lydia and Priscilla. Bishop Graham has written a poem on each painting and Tristan Latchford has written an anthem on each painting and poem.
Oddo Bam - The MorningThe Morning.
Saturday, 8 June 2024
Firstsite: Lunar Lullabies
This summer, an exhibition inspired by the timeless poem The Star (more widely known as Twinkle Twinkle Little Star) by writer Jane Taylor (1783-1824) will send space enthusiasts, young and old, on a cosmic odyssey.
Opening today at Firstsite in Colchester, the birthplace of Taylor and her poetic masterpiece, Lunar Lullabies, commemorates the 200th anniversary of the Essex writer's passing. It traces the artistic journey of Taylor's nursery rhyme and its profound influence on contemporary media, including comics, video games, and pop culture hits like Will Smith's "I'm Not a Star" and Nicki Minaj's "Starships."
The exhibition transforms the gallery into an immersive playscape of imagination and discovery, featuring interactive space objects, immersive extraterrestrial landscapes, and robot sculptures. Visitors are able to touch and discover objects ranging from meteorites and asteroid rocks to Lego Star Wars sets and bring their own cosmic creations to life.
Showcasing stunning artworks, historical artefacts and contemporary cultural nods, visitors discover how science, art and imagination have intertwined over the centuries to shape culture and our collective fascination with distant galaxies.
The exhibition is the result of a series of workshops with Firstsite youth programme YAK and families participating in Firstsite's innovative Holiday Fun programme – where they provide families facing financial challenges with fun, free days out full of art and sport along with a free family meal. YAK members and Holiday Fun families have made their own work, alongside producing collaborative artworks with commissioned artists.
The exhibition features a range of books and poetry by Taylor and her sister Ann to kick off a journey through the next 200 years.
The Star became hugely successful and a mainstay of childhood imagination, in part because of the etchings of the nursery rhyme. This art technique was impacted by science and space visions. A range of 19th-century etchings of comets in the night sky features in the exhibition.
There are a wide array of multimedia projects on display, all connecting space with the imagination. These include fantastical futuristic spaceship animation rooms by Mark Garlick, paintings of space rockets that move when viewed, and a ceramic work by British icon Grayson Perry with Alien Baby (2008) inspired by a maternity ward that he likened to a spaceship.
The work of Colchester-based Peter Elson (1947-1988), an illustrator who spent a career bridging childhood wonder of space with explorations of the future, is prominently featured. Decades of science fiction paperbacks from the 20th century have Elson's renderings on the cover, featuring planets, spaceships and star systems. Hugely influential on a new generation of sci-fi depicters, with brightly coloured backgrounds and sleek designs, he has been widely credited for providing the visual aesthetic to early video game productions in the 1990s.
Contemporary artists also show how the artistic obsession with what lies beyond the Earth's sky continues today. Essex-based artist Jackie Burns is a Fellow of the International Association for Astronomical Artists; her earlier works include science fiction book cover designs, and throughout her career, she has created work based on the scientific reality of space travel, such as through portraits of astronaut Tim Peake, as well as popular culture imagery such as characters from Star Wars. Burns led some of the workshops to develop the exhibition and her depiction of one of the most iconic spaceships in human history will feature; the one that fulfilled Blake's dreaming and took humankind onto the moon. The acrylic work Saturn V, Apollo 11, on Crawler to Launchpad 39A consists of different-sized circles of various colours that slowly reveal the image the longer you look.
In the 21st century, artists can now be found alongside scientists working towards space exploration, and the exhibition includes a number of paintings produced by British artist Matthew Turner during his residency at NASA.
A number of artists whose practices have developed at Firstsite will also be featured. The futuristic Colchester landscapes of local artist and Level Best alumni Henry Linstead will be shown, as well as work by those who attend Holiday Fun, including models of science fiction and gaming figures by the artist known as 'S' whose room installation which features over 1000 models, will immerse visitors into a world of dinosaurs and creatures whose fate was changed by an asteroid from space.
In total, the exhibition features over 100 artefacts and more than 100 artworks, the majority by artists from East Anglia, which explore our need for discovery, from the dreaming and wonderings of poets to the reality of scientific endeavour. Through a changing programme during the exhibition run, art and content from community groups and activities will also be on display. With this ambitious approach, Lunar Lullabies at Firstsite charts how the first nursery rhymes laid the foundations for the current stories that can be found in today's comics, video games and consciousness, with Colchester at the centre.
Firstsite Director Sally Shaw says, "Lunar Lullabies shows the true power of art and creativity—charting the journey from Jane Taylor's imagination in 1806 to the realities of scientific exploration today. By combining art and science, the exhibition brings STEAM to the heart of Colchester, using art as a method of learning and discovery to help us connect with the science of space exploration in a meaningful way.
"Working with local families and young people to make this exhibition has brought new voices and ideas, which are reflected in the vibrant and diverse selection of works – some which will spark nostalgia and others which will immerse you in a whole new futuristic world. Most importantly, this approach has created a really fun, inclusive space where our visitors can let their imaginations run wild!
“We hope Lunar Lullabies will inspire everyone to explore their creativity, with the knowledge that something imagined today may spark a creative chain reaction that ignites future explorations and discoveries, much like Jane Taylor's influence has done for centuries."
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Electric Light Orchestra - Mr Blue Sky.
Stride Magazine: Spiritual Suitcases
Check out my review of Spencer Reece's 'Acts' for Stride Magazine:
'He has written that 'A poet, like a priest, works with facts and mysteries: the facts mysterious, the mysteries factual' and has said that what he is after in poems or prose is 'telling the truth in the art'. Time, he suggests, “must somehow be dilated or pass before I can understand much of anything” but, when time has passed, 'in poetry, the autobiography becomes something else entirely, somehow selfless.' This is the essential movement in his life and work which, in the words of Jonathan Farmer, means that he 'offers pastoral attention to the wounded and discarded of the world—including, frequently, himself.' Poems, Reece suggests, are 'spiritual suitcases' which provide 'comfort in the hour of need.'
Spencer Reece is Vicar of St Paul’s Wickford in Rhode Island. Wickford in Essex (where I am based) has links with Wickford in Washington County, Rhode Island, USA. To read about these links, including past pulpit exchanges by priests from St Paul's Wickford and St Catherine's Wickford, see Wickford Community Archive here.
My other reviews for Stride include a review of two poetry collections, one by Mario Petrucci and the other by David Miller, a review of Temporary Archive: Poems by Women of Latin America, a review of Fukushima Dreams by Andrea Moorhead, a review of Endangered Sky by Kelly Grovier and Sean Scully, a review of John F. Deane's Selected & New Poems and a review of God's Little Angel by Sue Hubbard.
I am very pleased to be among those whose poetry has been included in Thin Places & Sacred Spaces, a new anthology forthcoming in 2024 from Amethyst Press. Check in at Amethyst Review for more details, including a publication date in July and an online launch and reading in September. I also had a poem included in All Shall Be Well: Poems for Julian of Norwich, the first Amethyst Press anthology of new poems.
'He has written that 'A poet, like a priest, works with facts and mysteries: the facts mysterious, the mysteries factual' and has said that what he is after in poems or prose is 'telling the truth in the art'. Time, he suggests, “must somehow be dilated or pass before I can understand much of anything” but, when time has passed, 'in poetry, the autobiography becomes something else entirely, somehow selfless.' This is the essential movement in his life and work which, in the words of Jonathan Farmer, means that he 'offers pastoral attention to the wounded and discarded of the world—including, frequently, himself.' Poems, Reece suggests, are 'spiritual suitcases' which provide 'comfort in the hour of need.'
Spencer Reece is Vicar of St Paul’s Wickford in Rhode Island. Wickford in Essex (where I am based) has links with Wickford in Washington County, Rhode Island, USA. To read about these links, including past pulpit exchanges by priests from St Paul's Wickford and St Catherine's Wickford, see Wickford Community Archive here.
My other reviews for Stride include a review of two poetry collections, one by Mario Petrucci and the other by David Miller, a review of Temporary Archive: Poems by Women of Latin America, a review of Fukushima Dreams by Andrea Moorhead, a review of Endangered Sky by Kelly Grovier and Sean Scully, a review of John F. Deane's Selected & New Poems and a review of God's Little Angel by Sue Hubbard.
To read my poems published by Stride, click here, here, here, here, and here. My poems published in Amethyst Review are: 'Runwell', 'Are/Are Not', 'Attend, attend' and 'Maritain, Green, Beckett and Anderson in conversation down through the ages'. My latest poem, 'The ABC of creativity', has been published by International Times. It cover attention, beginning and creation and can be read here.
Additionally, several of my short stories have been published by IT including three about Nicola Ravenscroft's EarthAngel sculptures (then called mudcubs), which we exhibited at St Andrew's Wickford last Autumn. The first story in the series is 'The Mudcubs and the O Zone holes'. The second is 'The Mudcubs and the Clean-Up King', and the third is 'The mudcubs and the Wall'. My other short stories to have been published by International Times are 'The Black Rain', a story about the impact of violence in our media, 'The New Dark Ages', a story about principles and understandings that are gradually fading away from our modern societies, and 'The curious glasses', a story based on the butterfly effect.
Stride magazine was founded in 1982. Since then it has had various incarnations, most recently in an online edition since the late 20th century. You can visit its earlier incarnation at http://stridemagazine.co.uk.
I have read the poetry featured in Stride and, in particular, the work of its editor Rupert Loydell over many years and was very pleased that Rupert gave a poetry reading when I was at St Stephen Walbrook.
Rupert Loydell is a poet, painter, editor and publisher, and senior lecturer in English with creative writing at Falmouth University. He is interested in the relationship of visual art and language, collaborative writing, sequences and series, as well as post-confessional narrative, experimental music and creative non-fiction.
He has edited Stride magazine for over 30 years, and was managing editor of Stride Books for 28 years. His poetry books include Wildlife and Ballads of the Alone (both published by Shearsman), and The Fantasy Kid (for children).
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For more on poetry, read my ArtWay interview with David Miller here and my interview with the poet Chris Emery for International Times. My review of 'Modern Fog' by Chris Emery is on Tears in the Fence. I have also written an article for Seen & Unseen 'Theresa Lola's poetical hope' about the death-haunted yet lyrical, joyful and moving poet for a new generation.
Stride magazine was founded in 1982. Since then it has had various incarnations, most recently in an online edition since the late 20th century. You can visit its earlier incarnation at http://stridemagazine.co.uk.
I have read the poetry featured in Stride and, in particular, the work of its editor Rupert Loydell over many years and was very pleased that Rupert gave a poetry reading when I was at St Stephen Walbrook.
Rupert Loydell is a poet, painter, editor and publisher, and senior lecturer in English with creative writing at Falmouth University. He is interested in the relationship of visual art and language, collaborative writing, sequences and series, as well as post-confessional narrative, experimental music and creative non-fiction.
He has edited Stride magazine for over 30 years, and was managing editor of Stride Books for 28 years. His poetry books include Wildlife and Ballads of the Alone (both published by Shearsman), and The Fantasy Kid (for children).
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Spencer Reece - The Upper Room.
Thursday, 6 June 2024
Love your Burial Ground and Churches Count on Nature week
- Saturday 8th - Messy Church Goes Wild, 2pm at St Mary’s Hall - Surveying starts
- Sunday 9th - Pet Blessing Service, 3pm St Mary’s North Churchyard
- Monday - Friday - schools being encouraged to visit - surveying continues
- Saturday 15th - Scavenger Hunt, 3pm St Catherine’s Churchyard - Surveying ends
- Video – Love Your Burial Ground Week – https://www.caringforgodsacre.org.uk/resources/films/video-love-your-burial-ground-week/
- Caring For God's Acre – the conservation charity for burial grounds across the UK - https://www.caringforgodsacre.org.uk/
- Wickford Wildlife - www.wickfordwildlife.co.uk
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Bruce Cockburn - O Sun By Day O Moon By Night.
Unveiled: Simon Law in concert
Prior to Ordination in 1996, Simon had spent 20+ years playing in Christian bands and working for an evangelistic charity, “The Wavelength Trust”. He has fronted: “Sea Stone”, “INTRANSIT” and “Fresh Claim”; doing hundreds of gigs across the UK and Europe. All of his musical output is published by Sea Dream Music and released through Plankton Records. Simon has played solo in Wickford (sometimes joined by his son on a few songs) several times and we look forward to this return gig.
Other upcoming Unveiled events include:
- Soothe (with Dance21) - A thoughtful and rambunctious exploration of the three modes of emotional regulation: threat, drive, soothe. Off-balance, emotive dance theatre embodying the hormones that push, pull and drag us through life. The performance is at 7pm, on Friday 28th June, at St Andrews Church, 11 London Road, Wickford. Tickets - £5. Book at https://www.nextstepcreative.co.uk/asp-products/sooth-with-dance21-wickford/
- Depeche Mode: Songs of Faith & Devotion - Friday 12 July, 7.00 pm, St Andrew's Wickford. Jonathan Evens talks about Christian influences in the music of Basildon band, Depeche Mode.
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Simon Law - God Cares For YouGod Cares For You.
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