I’m so delighted with this whole story written by Open Table Network that I’ve decided to share it with you to say their own words https://opentable.lgbt/our-news/2024/9/10/challenging-but-wonderfully-welcoming-exhibition-tour-closes-with-gift-to-open-table.
More Exhibitions?
If you had one of my exhibitions and want another, or if you missed out on hosting one of the Open to All or Spirit Justice stops, there is another chance. I have a set of paintings, Octave, owned by the Westhill Endowment. They are part of the Create Talk set of artwork which the Endowment loans, for free, to churches and community centres. I’m rather proud of the Create Talk brand, https://www.westhillendowment.org/faith-exhibits, as that is the name of the project I led for the United Reformed Church from the Mission department for three years. Rather than stopping the brand, and more importantly the purpose of linking churches with their communities via the visual arts, the URC gifted the brand to Westhill.
My own exhibition now part of Westhill is found here https://www.westhillendowment.org/octave. Reports of its impact with schools and local organisations shows excellent engagement and conversations. If you want this for your churches, please be in touch with Westhill!
Keep going!!! Says one...
Kieran, Open Table Network Director, and their Trustees and I had no idea that the Open to All tour would be so amazing on so many levels. We just decided to do it because it seemed to be a good and interesting idea. It felt a bit inspired, but didn’t blow us away. We just cracked on. We made a good enough case for purpose for the Westhill Foundation to help sponsor it and there was enough interest from churches for a good number of them to sponsor with direct expenses.
But it has been so very much more than any of us ever expected. First, it spawned the Spirit Justice tour. I had enquiries about taking Open to All to more churches and by time of receiving those invitations, we were booked. So I pulled together other artwork which I’d had in mind to tour and suggested that. As I write, Spirit Justice and Open to All are in their last venues of both tours. It has been incredible.
Winchester’s Church Secretary summed it up for me, “It has been everything we hoped for. It brought people over the threshold, it introduced us to people in the community we didn’t know, it has raised the profile of God’s and our own inclusion.” The Dean of Coventry remarked that the paintings allowed the Cathedral to illustrate what it has already been saying. The individual conversations I’ve had at each venue have been treasured moments.
We’ve seen a lot of rain, a lot of road and an enormous amount of unfailing hospitality. Help has been ready at hand, warmth has been flowing to take us in and support us. Pete and I have become quite the set up and close down specialists and our red Berlingo Abi has been awesome. Yes, we would do it again. The depth of conversation and faith to make community differences is the fantastic pay-off for us. Let alone the money raised to help support the Open Table Network and anti racist charities. Yes, we would do it again.
Spirit Justice tour in a SHOP!
It has been such fun to have the Spirit Justice tour in Aberdeen. The congregation from the Methodist Church and the United Reformed Church negotiated with the Trinity Centre Aberdeen and secured a corner unit to use for a month. It was a fabulous choice of disused shop with the whole space looking like a gallery in no time. A fabulous opportunity for the churches to show their joint work and mission, almost 200 people stopped by long enough to be counted. The visitors book shows that people came from all over Scotland and beyond. We had a wonderful opening, including attendees from the charity Grampians Racial Equality Council, who will be the recipients of the 40% raised from the sale of prints. The church members said that it was an excellent project to help them connect with their community and they were pleased to do it.
Eons ago, when I was a student in training for the ministry, I was artist in residence for the Milton Keynes Christian Council. We organised an exhibition called Images of God (I might have changed the name in later years), but it was a gathering of almost 700 pieces artwork from all over the new city with two and three dimensional artwork showing people’s ideas of God and of connecting with the Divine. The City Council sponsored it with display stands, David Bellamy opened it, and it was an awesome statement about a new city’s welcome of its people. It’s been a long time from that to this one-artist show and I confess that my heart is so in what just happened in Aberdeen. The comments from visitors showed how much the art spoke to them. The connections made by the churches were invaluable.
AND...breathe
In case you hadn’t spotted, we’ve doing a good deal of travelling. Over a thousand, closer to two thousand some months, of miles each calendar month since September. Also in case you hadn’t been reading my newsletter, most of those miles have been in a little or a deluge of rain. Today the sun is shining and its heaven. We’ve actually been in our own bed since July 9th. Amazing. We knew that running two parallel exhibitions would be time consuming, but we had no idea how much. This afternoon, just before this blog, I managed to finish a whole set of images for some illustrations I’m still in the middle of the commissioned work to do.
I keep reading that rest is important. Intellectually, I know it is true. Spiritually, I know it is true. Physically, my body has been managing my history by being busy. If I’m busy, then I’m not remembering things I don’t want to ever think about again. If I’m busy, I keep myself out of someone’s line of fire. If I’m busy, I keep myself proving that I’m worth it. Well, thanks to some lovely very hard work of Lent this year 2024 after the touring began, I let myself get as enormously angry as I wanted by doing a structured Lament every week day of Lent. I knew that I needed to rest regularly from that, so I let the weekends of Lent offer that rest. Result? I learned to rest. I intellectually, spiritually and physically, put my history to bed. Its power is gone. I can breathe.
So, increasingly since Lent, I’ve been resting, faffing, doing some adminstration and having wonderful catch-ups with friends and family. We have turned journeys to and from exhibitions into mini holidays for ourselves, and adding dinner with people we love, stopping to see unexpected family and even taking in the United Reformed Church General Assembly just for a visit. Thanks to the URC’s generosity, we stopped for Sunday lunch and renewed friendship and colleagueship all over the place.
I offer you rest, dear readers. I can testify to its power and its peace.
Residencies
I thought I’d take a moment, in the midst of two UK wide exhibition tours, to tell you about my residency work. Despite all the painting, despite all the digital illustration, by far my most loved art creation for me is in the stress and joy of the moment of an artist residency. That’s where I get asked to be on site or digitally in the moment, listen to conversations and decisions unfold, and capture what they look like to me. Fundamentally, I illustrate the real time process of coming to a mind about something.
Each residency is a story of progression - my commission, my arrival on site (or online), my preparation to do the work, the images as they developed with a story for each progression point, and the final piece. Sometimes there are images which go with each process moment and sometimes there aren't, but there is a flow from the commission to completion, all in more or less the same order.
Over the next months, my amazing web wizard will be designing a sets of pages which capture those process moments, then unfold each artwork or set of artworks and their narratives. I’m excited that they will all be online. It’s a wonderful moment for me! Migration Journey was from a residency https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f76e91b917a8a15a9d7b801/1706782422211-NW476L0VB718QNEZSB9G/Migration-journey.jpg?format=500w as was Peeps Table Talk https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f76e91b917a8a15a9d7b801/1706782416863-Y9B9OWXHER5KAS9P99NG/SofS-Peeps-table-talk.jpg?format=300w More will come!
‘Profoundly moving’ Open To All exhibition tour - Three more venues to go!
The Open to All tour continues with its 13 intriguing and affirming canvases, exploring the equality and inclusivity of God’s love.
We are presently enjoying the hospitality of Newport Cathedral, tucked into a town full of history of justice. Without question, the first objective of our tour, to open dialogue, is continually being achieved. We knew, half way through, that the churches and cathedrals where we’ve been invited have already developed an inclusive heart.
Coventry Cathedral’s Dean told us that the exhibition helped the cathedral illustrate what it had been saying. City URC in Cardiff has had an inclusive meeting like OTN since 2011, yet the exhibition helped them speak this more plainly. People brought people to see the images to speak about the content. Among many positive notes in the visitors book were,
‘Thanks for a very inspiring exhibition, hope it will stimulate me to find new ways of expressing my evolving experience of the mystery; I found this exhibition profoundly moving, the layers, the depths, the connections; Immensely moving and hopeful.’
An already established inclusive heart was made quite clear to us in Newport where one of the speakers was OTN patron the Right Revd Cherry Vann, Bishop of Monmouth, openly gay and in a civil partnership. She led the Pentecost communion service and was deeply welcoming of the exhibition’s message of God’s inclusive love. Revd Canon Andrew Lightbown from Newport Cathedral also spoke at the launch of the city’s Chartist history and the active work even now to let all voices be heard. The exhibition was welcomed with open arms by a very full congregation who walked away from the launch having bought enough prints to contribute £158 to OTN.
Our second objective, to help people engage with God more deeply for themselves continues to be met well. In one personal conversation, a woman told me that her experience of the painting Am I Free, illustrated absolutely her experience of coming to faith. She bought a print to be able to share that story with others. We continue to be thrilled as we see again and again how the conversations around the paintings help people talk about their own personal faith.
The exhibition’s third objective, to help people gain personal confidence, seems to be being met though people don’t talk so much about it to us or write it in the visitors book. We see it as we watch people have faith conversations and we know that it must be true because church members are inviting non-church members to visit the exhibitions. It is reported to us that there are a good number of visitors to each venue and this perhaps underlies those more confident engagements.
