Traceries: Exploring Hexham Abbey from a female perspective.

I have been visiting and working in the Abbey for nearly a year and with our impending exhibition looming I need to consolidate my ideas.  I find many things intriguing about Hexham Abbey but those that are salient are the fact that it seems like a “ home”, there are routines that are steadfast but there is also a haphazardness that is tolerated; I came into find Jesus folded in half in the children’s play area! The aspect I think I am going to explore more is “wear and tear”; of the fabric of the building – sometimes you come across sticky tape of varying sorts, which is laid, on bits of stone to keep it together- a metaphor for the soul.   I've been making a series of drawings based on these findings. I think that my contribution to the exhibition in September will be a selection of drawings and paintings based on these observations.

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...