Enjoyed an unusual cultural night out last Friday. Had an invite to a private view of a friend’s art exhibition, hosted in a tiny parish church tucked away in the countryside just off the A68 to the south of us.
Matilda is an artist of our generation, based near Hexham, whose practice covers collage, painting, drawing and monoprinting, largely influenced by art history. The work on show this weekend, suspended in front of the altar, is a towering 6B pencil drawing on paper of a Nootka Cypress tree that grows in Jesmond Dene, Newcastle. It was originally displayed, pre-Covid, in the park’s deserted banqueting hall courtesy of the Armstrong Studio Trust in April 2019.
Nootka Cypress is a native tree of northern America. The Nuu-chah-nulth people of Vancouver Island hold to the belief ‘hishuk’ ish tsawalk’ or ‘Everything is One’; everything in nature is interconnected, inseparable. The work measures 4 x 3 metres, took five months to complete and is hung here in the chapel in a more advantageous position, being on level ground, unlike the banqueting hall where it was on display at the bottom of steps. Everyone took turns to get up as close as we could to see things in detail. Scrutiny revealed horizontal parallel lines made as the artist, unrolling the paper as she progressed, picked up the grain of the wooden tabletop she was working on.
Matilda told me she was very grateful to the specialist installer for the skill and patience it took to safely erect scaffolding within the Grade II listed building and to secure the work with magnets onto its frame. Sadly Kim and I weren’t free to attend the following evening when our mutual friend Linda France would be giving a reading from her latest collection Startling and other work, reflecting the spirit of the natural world that inspired the drawing’s creation.
The chapel of St John lies is in the small village of Healy. It’s a parish of less than 200 souls in the area known as The Shire, between the valleys of the Tyne and the Derwent rivers, where Northumberland meets County Durham. Healey parish was originally a holding of the Knight Templars and later the Knights Hospitallers, and the neo-Norman design of the chapel pays homage to that medieval inheritance.
Built 1860, with tower added thirty years later, the chapel (which is also the parish church) boasts an unconventional three light pattern window in circular surround at its west end, and its illuminated presence cheered our arrival in the failing light. My eye was also taken by the (no-you-can’t really-sit-in-me) topiary yew chair by the entrance porch.
Adding to the building’s architectural charm, in 2011 it won an award from the charity Art and Christian Enquiry for two stained glass windows by Newcastle based Danish artist Anne Vibeke Mou and Durham born James Hugonin. These permanent additions to the fabric were commissioned by local landowner (and our host this evening) Jamie Warde-Aldam. Hugonin’s striking abstract work Contrary Rythmn consists of small rectangles of transparent and translucent glass in which a double helix can be traced in the colour patterns.
We left in high spirits, having enjoyed an unusual cultural treat, with a long overdue chance to catch up with old friends and make some new ones. It was also a rare opportunity to experience and reflect on the fluid interplay of religious space and creative expression in the company of artists and patrons.
STEPHEN TOMLIN 