Traceries: Exploring Hexham Abbey from a female perspective.

Over the last month I've been busy in my studio, which is my favourite place to be, so it's been a joy to have the time to focus on making something for this project. This work has come out of a couple of things that have been sitting in my studio for quite a while and images and thoughts that have resonated strongly with me from my visits to the abbey. The things that had sat waiting for an opportunity to be used in my studio are two large boxes full of tree bark,  an image of a suit of armour from a book in Newcastle central library and my desire to create something like my favourite object in the Hancock Museum in Newcastle which the suit of  Kiribati armour made out of coconut fibre. In the Abbey I have been drawn back time and time again to the tombs for the unknown women and their armour clad counterparts, the knights, who are depicted with their protective layers. So I have been building a suit of armour from the sections of tree bark, it...

A Flowered Cross At the start of the holidays, I went to Hexham Abbey on Sunday morning to meet Sheila, who is in charge of the flowers. It’s a very important, and at times stressful, part of Abbey life, the flowers. Especially in midsummer, when wedding season is in full swing, and there is sometimes more than one wedding per week, sometimes more than one wedding per day. Sheila is a very smart, friendly woman, who moved to the area from down South 30 years ago. I can tell that she is a bit nervous and sense that she thinks that I want to interview her in quite a formal way. Obviously, I don’t. I want to know about her life and her faith and how these overlap in the work she does in the Abbey but I don’t want to dive straight in, so we start with wedding season. The week preceding our meeting had been a busy one for Sheila, with a number of weddings taking place, including the nuptials of Lord Allendale’s niece. It had been a suitably grand and momentous affair and Sheila and...

I have upped my duties at the Abbey so I can experience how it operates at different times of day- as the light which floods the Abbey  changes through the day, so the activities of the day vary in tone ; the Abbey doesn’t just run religious services but puts on films! One late afternoon I came in hoping to find my usual solace to only find  John Huston's "The African Queen”, blasting out to  parishioners!     Another lunchtime I was lucky enough to observe these flowers responding to the light.

A rubbing I made from one of the Roman stones in the crypt at Hexham Abbey I am Bridget Kennedy, visual artist living in rural Northumberland. Through my visits to the Abbey over the past months, conversations with Melinda and Catherine and information gleaned from the excellent Abbey guides I have become very interested the fabric of the building, the material it is made of and where this material has come from. The crypt is of particular interest to me,  I live in an area where there are many old lead mines and I am often thinking about what is going on below the surface.   The crypt is all that remains of St Wilfrid's Benedictine Abbey built in the 670's. Wilfrid was able to build here due to the fact that Queen Eltheldreda had bequeathed the land to him in thanks for his help in securing her divorce from Prince Ecgfrith of Northumbria.  The key to part of a map of the crypt on display in the Abbey I really like that there are layers of h...

Catherine's first blog post Hello! My name is Catherine Ayres and I’m going to be (hopefully) writing poems as part of this project. I say ‘hopefully’ because I’m a slow writer, sometimes excruciatingly so. I could take up a whole blog of my own writing about my slow writing, so I’ll stick to Hexham Abbey for now. I first visited the Abbey a couple of months ago, with Bridget and Melinda, which is shameful because I’m a Northumbrian who’s lived here most of my life. My first impressions were coloured by my main interest, which is the lives of women in history. I’m currently (again, very slowly and in-between working full time as a teacher) researching for a PhD in creative writing, which is centred around writing poems about the women who lived on Hadrian’s Wall at the time of the Roman occupation and how I can make sense of their lived experience, as archaeologists say, by linking their lives with the lives of modern women. Hexham Abbey was built after Etheldreda, Queen of...

I am a volunteer guide at Hexham Abbey, which I love as it allows me to see the everyday running of this great place of refuge. Historically, pilgrims have visited the abbey for both solace and redemption.  I feel that Hexham Abbey is one of the few places in society where you will be welcome irrespective of creed, colour or gender. Above is a drawing I made of the Frith Stool in the Abbey. Frith, means peace and this 7th century  Frith Stool could be sat on and provide the person with  impunity- a seat of sanctuary! I like the fact that there is a candle placed on the right hand corner of the stool because it has obviously been left there by accident where as the stool is very firm and solid, a permanent fixture. The Abbey could be thought of as a solemn place, but it also has signs of life -  the remains of a  custard cream biscuit lying on one of the recesses ! I like the fact that the pattern on the biscuit might ech...