Photograph of a poster in Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery

Guyanese-British artist Hew Locke created ‘Foreign Exchange’ for the Birmingham 2022 Festival. He reimagined the sculpture of Queen Victoria in the city centre, surrounding the bronze statue with a boat containing five smaller Queen Victorias. Each wears a helmet and carries a medal relating to an important colonial battle. Hew Locke described the statue ‘leading a battalion of other statues to represent the home nation throughout the Empire’. After the Festival he generously donated the five smaller Queen Victorias to the city.*

*Information from a signboard next to the Victorias

The first picture is the colouring page that I promised to share with you in my recent post about my visit to Hodnet Hall. I coloured it during July and August.

The second two photographs are colourings that I started a while ago and only recently completed.

This Chapel has as its focus a replica of an extraordinary piece of art – the Stalingrad Madonna.

The curved figure of the Virgin Mary enfolds her baby in her hood, her eyes closed. The words around her translate as ‘1942 Christmas in the cauldron…Light, Life, Love’.

It was drawn at a time of terrible suffering, but the mother keeps her baby safe, a symbol of light, life and love.*

*Info from a signboard next to the chapel

Thornflower has its roots deep in the artist’s childhood in Prague (which she left in 1939) in happy memories of her grandmothers’ home “Das Rosel Haus (the house of rose)” and in the death of her grandmother in Treblinka in 1942.

It is a reflection not only on the Nazi Holocaust but on “man’s inhumanity” across history, representing, in Charlotte Mayer’s own words “an urgent wish to make a sculpture uniting opposing elements of thorns and flowers, to speak of reconciliation, peace and oneness”.

Roses and thorns are never far apart in life, but it is the beauty of the rose that we remember.*

*from a signboard next to the artwork

This 2009 interpretation of The Last Supper is by contemporary artist Lorna May Wadsworth. Featuring the Jamacan-born model Tafari Hinds as Christ.

It hit the headlines in the summer of 2020 when the artist heard it had been shot while in situ behind the altar of a church in Gloucestershire. The damage occurred on Christ’s right side, the same place a Roman soldier pierced the body of Jesus with his spear as he hung from the cross. (Gospel of St John 19.34)

For many centuries, the Papal Basilica of Saint Mary Major was called Saint Mary of the Manger or The Bethlehem of the West, owing to preservation in the Basilica, sine the 7th Century, of the precious relic of the Manger of the Child Jesus (today at the relquary crypt below the Main Altar. Originally, it was venerated at the Oratory of the Manger, built during the Pntificate of Theodore I (642 – 649). Arnolfo di Cambio, a key figure of mediaeval art in Italy, sculptured in 1291 for the ancient Oratory the first marble Nativity scen in the history of art. With that masterwork, his employer, the Franciscan Pope Nicholas IV (1288 – 1292), renewed the connection to the founder of his order, Saint Francis of Assisi, who established at Greccion the spiritual tradition of Nativity scenes.

The group consists of five Carrara marble statues: Saint Joseph, the heads of the ox and the donkey, one kneeling Magi and two stanidng Magi, carved from a single block. The sculpture of the seated Mary with Child is probably a version of the late 16th century that replaced a lost original one by Arnolfo.

The Nativity scene serves as an invitation to the faithful and visitors alike to rest, to pary and to meditate on the mystery of Life and Christ present. The Holy Father Francis advises: “As we contemplate the Christmas story, we are invited to set out on a spiritual journey, drawn by the humility of the God who became man in order to encounter every man and woman.“*

* Quoted from an information board next to the Nativity scene

Its original location was on the corner of Palazzo Soderini, between Piazza Barberini and Via Sistina. In one of the rooms on the ground floor of the building, Bernini had in fact designed a “booty” for water, that is, a system to collect the return water from the Triton fountain, which he had designed a few months earlier on commission from Pope Urban VIII Barberini (1623-1644).

The artist’s imagination, however, gave a service structure the unusual shape of an open bivalve shell. The lower valve served as a basin, while the other valve, modeled to adhere to the corner of the building behind, was decorated at the base with three bees (heraldic symbol of the Pope’s family). An inscription recalled the pope’s intervention for the construction of the fountain and the fountain as a “public ornament of the city”.

The fountain was dismantled in 1865 for traffic reasons and deposited in the municipal warehouses. Rebuilt between 1915 and 1916, it was located at the corner of the square towards Via Vittorio Veneto, in an isolated position. Fragments of the central bee and the portion of the valve on which it rests are the only original parts of the work.
The fountain was restored in 2000. In 2004 the head of a bee, which was lost following an act of vandalism, was replaced with a copy.

The Stations of the Cross refers to a series of images depicting Jesus on the day of his crucifixion and accompanying prayers.  The stations grew out of imitations of Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem which is believed to be the actual path Jesus walked to Mount Calvary.  The object of the stations is to help the Christian faithful to make a spiritual pilgrimage through contemplation of the Passion of Christ.

In the words of William Fairbank “The forest stations are dedicated to beings of the world for whom timber plays an integral part in their lives” and it was William’s love of timber and the attraction of the timeless nature of the subject that brought him to complete the fifteen sculptures which tell the story of the traditional account of Jesus death, depicting each stage, or station, along the road to the place of crucifixion. The images are formed within the natural and carved shapes and colours of different timbers.  The Forest Stations are on semi permanent display within the Nave of Lincoln Cathedral