Charles Gurrey: A Tribute to Wilfred Owen
Title: A Tribute to Wilfred Owen
Artist: Charles Gurrey (b. 1953, British)
Location: Chapel of Peace and Justice, Ripon Cathedral (C of E)
Date: 2014
In 2014, Ripon Cathedral acquired an installation acknowledging the Great War. A Tribute to Wilfred Owen by Charles Gurrey is set on the wall above the altar in the chapel of Peace and Justice at the west end of the north aisle of the nave in the position of a reredos. The piece is made up of five vertical pewter-coloured panels, which link the altar to the mediaeval canopy above. The five panels are approximately 4ft high and they have texts from some of Owen’s well-known war poems on them.
Towards the head of each ‘plank’, the texts, roughly gilded, are embossed on the panel’s textured surface, while elsewhere on each panel smaller texts are incised into the material at various angles. From a distance, the ‘reredos’ effect balances the canopy perfectly, and the larger embossed texts are legible from a distance. The effect is subdued and undemonstrative, and draws the spectator into the spare, womb-like space created by the overhanging canopy. The principal texts are, as you might expect, arranged in a sequence, so that the panels seem to be books on a shelf, with gilded titles on the spine, proclaiming:
‘My subject is war
I mean the truth untold
The pity war distilled
The poetry is in the pity’
The piece is bold, yet delicate in its message, beautifully celebrating the powerful words of one of Britain’s best World War I poets.
A note from Gurrey himself: ‘I did not want this piece to have a ‘lofty’ feel. Owen’s writing runs slam into a shocked, stunned, uncertain and all-too-literal present. Ordinary people’s experience becomes the witness to the largest things, and educated visions give way to the authority of a disciplined but raw, immediate, account. Perhaps using wood allows this to be a testament rather than a memorial. It is more approachable and tactile; more immediate, less refined. Owen does make the word ‘pity’ his own, and through his writing makes the word inseparable from received notions we have of the First World War. The four principal phrases work like a roundel – where the order hardly matters – with the effect of something recited. (Two come from a preface Owen drafted at Ripon, and two come from ‘Strange Meeting’.) Subsidiary phrases come from ‘Apologia’, ‘Strange Meeting’ and ‘The Calls’, and are partly visual texture (with the invitation to touch on closer inspection), and partly the implication that it is the poetry we can trust to be the witness.’
Charles Gurrey studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Balliol College, Oxford and took a postgraduate degree a tSt John’s College, Cambridge. Rather than pursuing an academic career, Gurrey followed his passion for sculpture and worked a six-year apprenticeship with Dick Reid, subsequently becoming a self-employed sculptor in 1994. He has since undertaken many commissions for public art and architectural sculpture.
Further Information
Medium: Oak with graphite and bronze powders
Size: 127.3 x 96.8 x 6cm
Permanent display
See Charles Gurrey’s A Tribute to Wilfred Owen on the Ecclesiart map here.
Other artworks in churches by Charles Gurrey: York minster font; Nativity figures, Leicester Cathedral; Nave altar and font, Guildford Cathedral; Choir screen figures, York Minster; Hanging rood, Worsbrough; Tetramorphs, corbel carvings at St Olave’s Church York; St Giles, Matlock; Catholic Cathedral Sheffield: concept proposal for altar. See more information here.