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Max MULHERN

Drawings & Sculptures

11 - 27 June 2009

Max has infused the show at Sacred Space with a strong maritime under current. It is probably no small coincidence that the bows of boats are enclosed by a safety feature called a pulpit. Crew can sit on them or grab hold of them in case of imminent peril. “Anyone onboard can nestle there and look out over the sea like a preacher. The spectacle is often so beautiful that words too big to say well up in the throat. In these pulpits we listen. »

Light meets Light

Encaustic and oil on canvas

CHRISTINE WATSON

Works from Journey and Arrival

19 March - 1 May 2009

My paintings come about over a number of years; I work on about ten at a time in rotation. The impasto is partly a result of reworking and a desire to give substance to light itself. The nature of the work has revealed itself gradually to me. The figures are a collective presence, watching waiting moving, active passive neutral, suspended at the moment of and before arrival.

Mary Lee MURPHY

‘Celebration of Light’

19 - 26 February 2009

‘Inspiration’- to be inspired... As an artist I am inspired by nature, the land, the light, and the colours.

Inspiration is a movement of the spirit, and the artist is drawn to create works that reflect something of the beauty of Creation.

The works I make come from my contemplation of moments in nature, of pieces of light, and of themes of redemption.

They are designed to be contemplated as a hymn to the mystery of life.

Red Textile (detail)

48’’x120’’ Hand dyed silk habouti/silk organza textile with gold leaf.

Tent on an Island water colour on paper

Clare Newbolt

5 - 15 February 2009

WILDERNESS

A solitary tree, a few birds, ice, snow-blocked streams: in the expanse not even a hint of human presence. Why do we gaze at scenes like this with such fascination? Do we imagine the gods to live there? Do we seek wisdom in this place? Yes we do: it is a place inside us that we all turn to at some time or another as a place without boundaries where we find both fear and solace.

In the distance a high mountain its awe inspiring scale reducing everything before it to insignificance. We stand transfixed. Its dominance in the picture shows both its configuration of ourselves and its complete indifference to our existence.

Clare Newbolt is currently researching a PhD at the Prince’s School of Traditional Art, London

This exhibition programme was organised around the Constantinople Lecture which in 2008 was hosted by St John’s Notting Hill. The lecture will be delivered by His Excellency, the Most Reverend Metropolitan Kallistos of Diokleia, on 27 November 2008.

The exhibition celebrated Byzantine Art as it is still practiced today in important centres of Byzantine Orthodoxy like Mount Athos and Romania.

It included icons by Pater Iakobos, a monk from the Holy Mountain, frescos by Adrian Iurco from Romania, as well as a photographic documentary by renowned photographer Dragos Lumpan.

Contemporary Byzantine Iconography

20 November 2008 - 31 January 2008

Icons, Fresco & Photographic Documentary

Virgin Hodigitria By Fr Iakobos, Athos

Paul Wilkins studied theatre design at Wimbledon School of Art and graduated in 1986. For the next ten years he worked as a designer/maker for theatre, film, opera and contemporary dance. In the mid nineties he grew increasingly interested in the craft and art of fine furniture making and after training at the London Guildhall University he started to work as a professional cabinetmaker producing bespoke handmade furniture.

Painting and drawing have always been an important part of Paul’s creative working process and it was whilst he was living on the North West Norfolk coast that he was able to concentrate on developing further this aspect of his work.

Mandalas & Cosmic Maps

Paul Wilkins

18 Sept - 2 Oct 2008

Elise DeLong

23 May - 31 July 2008

Elise DeLong recently completed her PhD at the Prince’s School of Traditional Arts, London. At The Prince’s School, she specialized in Medieval and Renaissance painting techniques and geometric composition in the Islamic and European Christian traditions. Her thesis, entitled "A Book of Remembrance: Elements of Art Considered in Light of the Whole", investigated the symbolic properties of each stage of creating a painting. It is her experience that every aspect of the creative process can become an act of devotion. It is her hope to make work that reflects a love of beauty, goodness, and truth and she finds inspiration in the profound principles of order reflected in the world of nature. Nature obeys fundamental geometric laws – exhibited clearly in the simultaneously infinite and limited forms of snowflakes, the movement of the heavens, the symmetry of a rose. The discipline of geometry has been applied throughout history to build civilization’s most sacred buildings, and was also applied to the craft of painting by medieval and renaissance artists. Elise finds inspiration in these arts and techniques; her paintings have therefore been composed using the principles of what is often loosely termed “sacred geometry,” or in other words, mathematical proportions which have symbolic resonance. Whenever possible, she makes her own paints from traditional pigments derived from earth, stones, insects, and plants.

White Hart

egg tempera on gesso with gold leaf

Tom Bree

Sara Salman

Samantha Buckley

Javier Romano

Amber Khokhar

Lisa Delong

Ayesha Gamiet

Nooshin Shafiei

Alumni of the Prince’s school of Traditional Arts

28 October - 28 November 2009

Contemporary Coptic Icons

10 April - 18 May 2008

Stéphane René is the foremost exponent of the Neo-Coptic School in the West. He studied for 6 years under the school’s founder, the late Prof. Isaac Fanous, at the Institute of Coptic Studies, Cairo. He received his PhD from the Royal College of Art, London in 1990 and has since worked internationally, notably in California and Europe as well as the UK. He teaches regular classes in both, the Byzantine and Coptic styles and leads workshops internationally. He supervises doctoral research in iconography at the Prince’s School of Traditional Art and is associated with the Temenos Academy.

Flight into Egypt

egg tempera on gesso with gold leaf

Archived exhibitions

SACRED
SPACE

St Anthony the Great

3 - 24 December 2009

Aleksandras Aleksejeva

Bronze Relief Icons

Using bronze relief, a technique that he has studied in depth, and that was common in mediaeval and renaissance religious and secular art, but that has since fallen into comparative disuse, Aleksejevas demonstrates a profound mastery of his medium, to produce works that are surprisingly innovative, while still remaining true to the traditional iconographic canon. Following the theory that has animated much of his earlier work, and especially that dealing with religious and archaic pagan themes, Aleksejevas reduces his forms to their essentials in order better to express their inherent power. In this he reflects exactly one of the pre-eminent tenets of orthodox iconography. The use of relief for his icons is, however, unsusual, and recalls a very rare and special category of Byzantine sculpture that was mainly confined to Macedonia in the 9th to 13th Centuries, and which brings a third, “fleshly” dimension to the works which is absent in the flat topography of most orthodox image-making. As Professor Pentcheva of Stanford University’s Art History department comments in her article The Performative Icon: “… with the relief icon, matter fills an empty shell and gives materiality or substance to what is no longer there, to what is beyond the tangible: a present absence…relief icons display divine appearance through textured matter.”

From an article by Jonathan Wiggin March 2007

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Flames Stained glass

As a stained glass artist, my windows are a lens through which light is directed and transformed. The light of the window is not contained, unlike a painting or a print it doesn’t stay on a flat surface unchanging. There are the unexpected: rainbows darting from prisms, jewel facets casting fragmented lines on crumbling plaster and coloured light illuminating the heads of a congregation. The reflected glory of each window flares and fades as clouds scud across the sky forming an internal landscape on walls and floors. After a childhood in which I travelled from England to Nepal, I am now firmly rooted in a rural Benefice near the North Downs filled with wonderful medieval churches: yet the light, colours and influences of this time abroad are still with me.

Alexandra LeRossignol

Stained glass & Photography

15 March - 19 April 2010