Alice Sielle: Stations of the Cross
Title: Stations of the Cross
Artist: Alice Sielle (b. 1950, British)
Location: St Barnabas Bethnal Green (C of E)
Date: 2004
Alice Sielle’s Stations of the Cross for St Barnabas, Bethnal Green, are small scale linocuts, framed sympathetically and placed at regular intervals around the church.
The Rev’d Brian Ralph was serving as Team Vicar at the nearby church of St John on Bethnal Green during the commissioning of Chris Gollon’s Stations of the Cross. When he moved to St Barnabas, there were no Stations, ‘except for a box of odd ones which were wheeled out for Good Friday’. The local artist Alice Sielle, whose linocut Christmas cards Ralph had admired, was commissioned to create a series for the church.
Of the commission, Sielle wrote, ‘I had no idea how to approach the subject. My faith has always been like a Will o’ the Wisp; I was not familiar with the Stations of the Cross, and I have never understood the meaning of the Cross. [...] In the end I gave up on the meaning of the Cross and interpreted them as man’s inhumanity to man. It was the most harrowing thing I have ever done and it left me an emotional wreck.’ Drawing on the paintings of the early Italian Renaissance, Sielle’s linocuts – printed using the back of a spoon on Japanese printmaking paper – show a dignified Christ in a series of striking compositions. In each there is a diagonal from the bottom left to the top right – with the exception of Christ’s stripping (Station X) and His death (XII), where we pause at the vertical. Between these, ‘Jesus is nailed to the Cross’ returns to the diagonal, emphasising his physical suffering, and pointing forward both to the form of the Pietà (XIII) and, perhaps, to the Resurrection.
A book of the prints was published in 2021, and can be purchased on our website, with all proceeds going to Art + Christianity.
Alice Sielle (b. 1950, British) was born in London, and attended Bath Academy of Art between 1967 and 1969. She is predominantly an abstract painter with a wide range of influences from Barnet Newman to Piero della Francesca, and has exhibited in mixed and solo shows since the 1970s. She lives and works in East London.
Further Information
Medium: Linoprint
Size: c.30 x 30cm each
Permanent display
See Alice Sielle’s Stations of the Cross on the Ecclesiart map here.
Commissioner: The Revd Brian Ralph