If you didn’t manage to visit the Vessel art trail, now’s your chance to experience it online with the team!

Hear about the project’s conception, our partnership with Friends of Friendless Churches, the process of choosing and curating the art, and the community engagement and evaluation.

Four of the artists joined us – Barbara Beyer, Andrew Bick, Steinunn Thorarinsdottir and Jane Sheppard.

This lecture explores the ways in which art, architecture and theology are intertwined - it explores the ways in which stones speak of God in the communities where they are placed, and how flesh and spirit encounter the divine in and around religious spaces. The lecturer brings together ideas of sacrament, incarnation and justice in reflections around 'Buildings, Bodies and Spirit'.

Art + Christianity’s 2024 annual lecture was given by the Director of V&A East, Dr Gus Casely-Hayford on 8 Feb 2024 at St James’s Piccadilly.

‘Balthazar: the third man drawn from the shadows’ explored the story of the African wise man, and race and racism in religious art.

Please note the video comes into focus half way through the introductions – please keep watching!

Fluid Body – a collaboration between Art and Christianity, and Morphē Arts – was an evening of performance, film and discussion exploring bodily liquids and their theological significance. There were live performances by the artists Mimi Nicholson and Ilyas Kassam, followed by a talk by Dr Marika Rose and discussion chaired by Prof. Ben Quash, a trustee of both A+C and Morphe Arts. The evening explores the liquid matter of milk, sweat and blood in contemporary performance art and Christian theology. Through the nourishing acts of breastfeeding and prayer we sense the fluid interplay of life and its rhythms: from a mother’s milk for a new life to the sweat, tears and blood of suffering and death, and the fluidity of life in between. In Luke’s account of the garden of Gethsemane, Jesus’ desperate prayers in the moments before his death manifest in sweat, like drops of blood: an image of anguished life pouring out of the body.

Ilyas Kassam’s process is autonomic, performative, and works through the natural movements of the body. He shared the work Your Body Is A Gift Forgiven (or Every Body Is a Trapped Prayer).

Mimi Nicholson gave a performance in which she aligned herself with the art historical Maria Lactans tradition and that of the Annunciation. This image of breastfeeding, and the sharing of milk from one body to another, provokes questions of motherhood, embodied life, and the dependence of Jesus on another for nourishment.

Born in 1986 in the UK, Ilyas Kassam is an Indian Ismaili Visual Artist and Poet. Drawing from Ismaili, Kufic, and Japanese calligraphic traditions, his works centres around the notion of infinity and the role language plays within the mystical experience. He was an exhibitor at the 2018 International Ismaili Islamic Arts Festival. His film ‘Ligare’ was screened in 2018 at TSS, Time Square, New York. In 2020 His exhibition ‘The Way’ was held at the institution of Port Art and Design Tsuyama, Japan, as part of a joint show with the infamous icon, Misuzu Kaneko. His painted works have gained recent acclaim due to his novel reimagining of ancient techniques. Ilyas is a self-taught artist whose education emerged out of an immersive 5-year period of meditation and self-discovery. In 2009 he visited the Kangra valley, India, where he spent months meditating in the cave of Baba Sant Ram. This experience gave birth to a prolific period of creative and philosophical inquiry. Ever since his work has been rooted in the esoteric, and has paid reverence to mystical traditions across the world. He has since studied under shamans, learning the language of plants at Schumacher College, and journeyed to the Guangxi mountains of China, to learn calligraphy with the Langshi Shifu. His process is autonomic, performative, and works through the natural movements of the body. With roots in Ismaili esoteric thought, he draws inspiration from expressionistic practices including the Bokujinkai and Gutai movements that emerged out of Japan in the 1950s. His practice seeks to create spaces and materials that embody a temple like theurgy, reflecting the inner architecture of his process; Where everything is unknown, emergent and runicaly spontaneous.

Mimi Nicholson graduated from Goldsmith’s BA Fine Art in 2020 and has since been reading for her MPhil in Modern Theology at Oxford. Her work uses limited domestic technology, materials and spaces in order to create performances of self-portraiture, usually in the form of photography or video. She has also worked in set design, installation, writing and painting, both collaboratively and independently. Through the use of persona – often as oblique subversions of well-known icons, characters or actions – Mimi’s work strives to interrogate the interplay of the unified self, before God, and the multiple selves of everyday existence. More recently, she has become concerned with the more explicitly theological implications of performance, especially in relation to the eucharistic body and the act of confession. Making, for Mimi, is a way of revelling in the wonderful breadth of expression available in the living body; with all its contexts, fleshiness, crude directness and nuance.

In 2017, Mimi co-founded Themselves, a multi-disciplinary network providing space for cultural-production and research, with other Goldsmith’s peers. She is currently Associate Editor of The Journal of the Oxford Graduate Theological Society. Mimi now lives with her husband and daughter in rural Buckinghamshire.

Art + Christianity trustee Rev’d Dr Ayla Lepine guides us in an exclusive tour of her National Gallery exhibition, ‘Fruits of the Spirit: Art from the Heart’. Inspired by St Paul's letter to the Galatians, which lists nine themes including love, joy, and peace as positive attributes for building community. Together with nine UK partners including Canterbury Cathedral, Leicester Art Gallery and Museum, and the Barber Institute in Birmingham, this virtual exhibition – with a free downloadable catalogue with over 20 authors and an audio guide by Smartify – features paintings by artists including van Eyck, Monet, Rembrandt and van Gogh, as well as Winifred Knights, Lizzie Jones and Marguerite Gerard. This tour focuses on the importance of social justice partnerships, from climate change activism in Plymouth to refugee support in London, in relation to the exhibition's highlights. This is an online tour of the virtual exhibition, which can be accessed here

‘The Dust of the World – a personal reflection on painting and transience’ explores traditional Japanese concepts of space and place, both in architecture and painting, and the way the power of the void and shifting

multiple viewpoints are used to powerful effect. Rebecca reflects on the influence these concepts have had on her work culminating in a collaborative project with a composer Max de Wardener.

The Rev’d Lucy Winkett, Rector of St James’s Piccadilly, gave a response to the lecture and hosts a Q&A session after the lecture.

Introduction and welcome by Rev’d Dr Ayla Lepine, Associate Rector of St James’s Piccadilly.

About Rebecca Salter
After graduating from Bristol Polytechnic Rebecca Salter lived in Japan for six years, including two years as a research student at Kyoto City University of Arts, Japan. While in Japan she trained in many traditional techniques and combines these interests

with her main practice in painting and drawing. In 2011 she had a major retrospective at Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut and has also featured in numerous international solo and group exhibitions.

She was elected a Royal Academician in 2014. In 2017 she became Keeper of the Royal Academy of Arts and in December 2019 was elected President, the first woman to hold the position in the Royal Academy’s history.

This event was chaired by Novelette Stewart, Conservator, and member of the Cathedrals Fabric Commission for England and a trustee of A+C.

The event was part of a series of talks and events in which we took a detailed view of the elements of water and light in art and religious ritual as well as theological reflections on art inspired by the sea and sky.

Thumbnail image: William Pye, Salisbury Cathedral Font, photo by Ash Mills

Following the damage and destruction to churches and other buildings caused by enemy bombing during the Second World War, the art of stained glass played an important role in the rebuilding of post-war Britain. Commissions for stained glass artists were aplenty, with opportunities arising for the design of new windows (often with commemoration or regeneration in mind) alongside the restoration and rearrangement of old. Yet in spite of this activity, and the popularity of modern art and architecture, studies of 20th century stained glass remain sparse.

This paper provides an introduction and general overview to the style, development and broader context of stained glass in post-war Britain, focusing especially on stained glass made for British churches between 1945 and 1980. It will draw attention to the almost entirely ignored, yet nonetheless important, contribution of stained glass to the canon of British ‘modern art’, revealing new approaches to form, style, materials and techniques and modern expressions of religious and symbolic themes. Focusing on the work of relatively little-known artists such as Geoffrey Clarke and Margaret Traherne alongside the various productions of designers and craftsmen working for commercial studios such as Whitefriars Studio (Powells) and Goddard & Gibbs, it will examine these artists and studios’ flexible and sensitive approach to designing for both new and traditional architectural and symbolic contexts.

Several major sacred art projects that either contained stained glass or were mainly about stained glass emerged in post-war France. All of them were in one way or another associated with the Dominican-backed sacred art movement, Art Sacré. This talk will present the church of Notre-Dame-de-Toute-Grâce on the Assy Plateau in the French Alps (windows by Georges Rouault, Marc Chagall and Jean Bazaine among others) consecrated in August 1950, the windows by Alfred Manessier at the Saint-Michel church in Les Bréseaux inaugurated in December 1950, Henri Matisse’s Chapelle du Rosaire in Vence consecrated on 25 June 1951, Fernand Léger and Jean Bazaine’s work at the Sacré Coeur church in Audincourt consecrated on 16 September 1951, and Le Corbusier’s Notre-Dame du Haut chapel at Ronchamp inaugurated on 25 June 1955. It will focus on the projects’ contexts and the windows’ contents. Each project exemplifies in a different way the Dominican Father Marie-Alain Couturier’s famous “Bet on Genius” (recruit only the best and let artists be artists and priests be priests – of course he was both) and all of them contribute in one way or another to this exceptional moment in the history of sacred art and to art and architectural history tout court.

Art historian Inge Linder-Gaillard is Director of the École des Beaux-Arts in Marseille, France. She was previously Head of Exhibitions at the National Centre for Contemporary Art – Le Magasin in Grenoble and taught art history at the University of Grenoble. She earned her MA and PhD in art history at the Courtauld Institute, London. Her PhD focused on sacred art and architecture in France, 1965-2000. She has published many articles and essays on contemporary art, and co-wrote with Flora Samuel Sacred Concrete: The Churches of Le Corbusier (Birkhaüser, 2013). She has served on the editorial board of Art and Christianity for several years, and has contributed to other such specialist journals including ARTS: The Arts in Religious and Theological Studies, Les Chroniques d’Art Sacré and the online journal Narthex. She is also a longstanding member of the board of the Association Œuvre Notre Dame du Haut, responsible for the chapel by Le Corbusier in Ronchamp (Unesco World Heritage site 2016).

This paper looks at the origins of John Piper’s interest in stained glass and at his discovery of a vital relationship between the medieval and the modern. The influence of the Romanesque recurs throughout his career, but is particularly evident in his first commission, in the early 1950s for the three windows in Oundle School Chapel. This marked the onset of his working partnership with Patrick Reyntiens. The success of the Oundle glass brought Piper and Reyntiens a fistful of further commissions, among them the Baptistery window for the new Coventry Cathedral. Before embarking on this, Piper made visits to France that took him to many of the sites discussed in the previous paper. The result was a landmark achievement in the history of stained glass owing to its powerful and meaningful use of abstraction. Piper did not begin designing stained glass until in his fifties, but over the next thirty years he fulfilled 64 commissions, including the glass for the Cathedral of Christ the King in Liverpool, with its massive lantern.

Frances Spalding, CBE, FRSL, is an art historian, biographer and critic, with a specialist interest in twentieth-century British Art. She is the author of some 17 books, including 'John Piper, Myfanwy Piper: Lives in Art', which is published by Oxford University Press and available in paperback. She taught at Newcastle University for 15 years, becoming Professor of History of Art, edited The Burlington Magazine, 2015-16, and is now a Fellow of Clare Hall and was until August 2022, Chair of the A+C Trustees.

Keith New was one of the three-man team who designed and made the ten 70-foot nave windows for Coventry Cathedral from 1953-1958. Aged 27 when commissioned, New was the youngest of the three and the project was to launch his short but intensely creative career in stained glass. It was short because commissions dried up in the late 1960s and intense because New was a consummate artist craftsman who designed and made almost all his windows himself.

Four of his commissions will be considered in some detail to illustrate his emotional and spiritual response to each and to demonstrate the range of techniques he deployed to meet his various patron’s demands and financial constraints. New’s initial training was in graphic design, which informs the colourful results of his deep thinking about the meaning of his work, on which he devoted considerable energy and flair.

Diana Coulter was acquainted with Keith New from 1989 onwards, personally as well as professionally at Kingston Polytechnic where he headed Foundation Studies. Seeing the great east window at St John Ermine in Lincoln for the first time in 2010 was the catalyst for researching New’s stained glass. A professional historic buildings consultant, Coulter has extensive architectural knowledge gained through study and practice. With Dr Robert Smith, she has co-authored a monograph and catalogue raisonné on Keith New which will be published in February 2018.

Stained glass commissioned for churches in the diocese of Llandaff during the aftermath of the Second World War was both conservative and also increasingly austere, eschewing architectural borders and backgrounds for plain quarries around figures and scenes. By the end of the 1950s the preference of the Diocesan Advisory Council changed completely, encouraging the use of strong colour and vigorous design. The transition throws into sharp focus the more routine work of A.L. Wilkinson and Arthur Walker in the late 1940s and 50s with the more original approach of Francis Spear and John Petts in the late 1950s and 1960s, while the Welsh firm Celtic Studios demonstrated flexibility in accommodating more modernist tastes.

Martin Crampin is an artist, designer and historian. Since 1999 he has worked on a series of research projects concerning aspects of visual culture in Wales at the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies in Aberystwyth. He has developed a particular expertise in the study of ecclesiastical art and this also forms the primary focus of his artistic practice, making images based on patterns and images found in the medieval decorative arts of Wales.

Crampin has been recognised as the leading expert on stained glass in Wales and is an acclaimed photographer. He published his Stained Glass from Welsh Churches in 2014, before establishing his own small press producing small books on the art and history of churches in Wales. Crampin is currently part-time Research Fellow at the Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, working on the ‘Lives of the Welsh Saints’ project.

Remembrance of the devastation caused by two world wars formed the backdrop to the role of stained glass in restored churches from the 1950s onwards. Penitential creativity permeated the forward-looking vision of those making stained glass windows in Germany. Celebration of France’s internationally acknowledged cultural prowess inspired French firms, while the updating of traditional values continued to engage stained glass artists working in a rapidly changing Britain. The interaction of our continental neighbours with British stained glass will be explored in this lecture.

Caroline Swash ATD, FMGP is a stained glass artist, tutor and writer whose architectural commissions include windows for Gloucester, Portsmouth and Salisbury Cathedrals and the complete scheme (with HOK London) for St Barnabas, Dulwich fabricated with Goddard and Gibbs' Studios. From 1998 to 2011, she ran the 'Glass, Art and Architecture' courses at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design. Her publications include Stained and Art Glass with Dr Judith Nieswander, Medical Science and Stained Glass (2005) and The 100 Best Stained Glass Sites in London (2016). She continues to be actively involved in making, lecturing and writing about the background and current practice of stained glass.

Stained glass windows created by Jean-Pierre Raynaud and Pierre Soulages for the Abbeys of Noirlac and Conques employ a minimalistic style sensitive to their Romanesque contexts but also express qualities one might call Cistercian, even though only one of the commissions was created for an actual Cistercian abbey. As a form of monasticism, “Cistercian” signifies values of simplicity, poverty, and austerity presented by the founders of the Cistercian Order as essential to the monastic life and embodied in the rigor of their architecture. Natural light is a key element in Cistercian fenestration, differing significantly from the display of color associated with Gothic stained glass. I argue that a form of neo-Cistercianism is evident in and exemplified by the works of Raynaud and Soulages for their respective abbey commissions, in which an aesthetic of restraint and economy aims, above all, to treat the configuration of light as the primary consideration.

This paper was given at the 2017 symposium 'In glass thy story' which addressed over 70 years of innovation and iconography in the glass art of British and European churches and Cathedrals.

Organised and hosted by A+C.

In the film, the artist performs creative and sacred rituals that inform history, identity and politics. Although rich with strikingly beautiful imagery, AmaHubo does not romanticise the difficult experience of navigating the complex interactions between African spirituality and Christian belief systems, and specifically, the role that women play in the practice, position and power of religion.

Joel Cabrita is an historian of modern South African at Stanford University.

Included on the path is St Michael and All Angels, Berwick, well-known for its extensive decorative scheme by Bloomsbury artists Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell and Quentin Bell. A major project to restore and conserve these was completed in November 2020.

Dr Tim Winter, Chair of the Cambridge Mosque Trust, gives an overview of Europe’s first eco-mosque, its garden setting and the symbols, structures and geometries that ‘remind us of the interconnectedness of humans and the natural world’.