Ecclesiart is an online project that raises awareness of significant works of modern and contemporary art since 1920 in UK churches and cathedrals.

The selected works represent the diversity of high quality church commissions and reflect developments in artistic practice and ecclesiastical art and design. You can explore the collection using the tiles below or by using the Ecclesiart map.

We seek to encourage increased responsibility towards works which may be under-appreciated or at risk and hope that this selection of works provides inspiring and challenging examples of art in churches useful to any parish or individual wishing to commission a new work.

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We welcome nominations of new works to be added to Ecclesiart. Please email us with a short text about why you think a work of art should be included with a short theological reflection on the work and its context (no longer than 150 words) and if possible please include images. Please note that we do not accept nominations from artists for their own work.

All permanent works shortlisted for the Award for Art in a Religious Context are added to Ecclesiart. For all other nominations, the Director and trustees of Art and Christianity reserve the right to select works which they determine as meeting the criteria of aptness to context, artistic and technical merit and appropriate theological meaning.

 

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Ecclesiart, Ecclesiart Batch 4 Rey Conquer Ecclesiart, Ecclesiart Batch 4 Rey Conquer

Theo Moorman: Altar frontal

Theo Moorman’s woven frontal was made initially for a side chapel at Gloucester Cathedral but was relocated to the small Norman church of St Mary, Syde, when the Thomas Denny windows were installed. Despite not being made for the church, the frontal suits its new home. The abstract composition suggests a ray of light shining out from the centre of the altar, infusing a landscape of blues with a soft yellow-gold light. The palette seems to gesture towards the church’s dedication, and echoes the Virgin’s robes in the modern window above, as if developing the symmetrical folds and strictly alternating green-gold pattern of the glass, as well as the simple floor paving, in its own, looser and yet rigorous way. The arrangement of colours and deviations from complete symmetry appear to follow a deeper logic that the weaving, as a work not just of craftsmanship but of art, makes visible.

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Ecclesiart, Ecclesiart Batch 4 Rey Conquer Ecclesiart, Ecclesiart Batch 4 Rey Conquer

Victoria Rance: Comforter

St Laurence Church, Catford, is a notable octagonal church built by Ralph Covell in 1968. The east wall behind the freestanding altar presented a problem that for several decades remained unsolved. A plain cloth screen covering the organ pipes formed an unsatisfactory backdrop to the sanctuary, despite an illuminated dalles de verre cross in its centre. The space ‘was an empty vacuum – not even a positive absence – a negative space demanding to be filled’, as Charles Pickstone, the current vicar, has put it. Victoria Rance, an artist based in nearby Deptford, was commissioned in 2008 to produce a work that would solve this problem, with enough visual force to fill and unite the space without distracting from the altar and sanctuary.

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Ecclesiart, Ecclesiart Batch 3 Stuart Hillcock Ecclesiart, Ecclesiart Batch 3 Stuart Hillcock

Adrian Wiszniewski: The Good Samaritan and The House Built on Rock

Here the parable is brought into the present-day: the Good Samaritan is a young woman who has stopped to help a naked man who sits in a pool of his own blood. The same colour red forms a cross that flows up from the pool of blood above the woman's head. Young, smart professionals exchange business cards in the foreground while a couple in the fore and background look into the middle-distance, unmoved. The painting is 11ft tall with a complex interplay of figures, colours and forms that comes to a head upon the victim.

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Ecclesiart, Ecclesiart Batch 3 Stuart Hillcock Ecclesiart, Ecclesiart Batch 3 Stuart Hillcock

Maggi Hambling: The Winchester Tapestries

Created by Maggi Hambling for the High Altar at Winchester Cathedral, these tapestries, the artist’s first, were dedicated on 7 July 2013. Maggi Hambling collaborated with Ateliers Pinton – a French tapestry workshop in the Aubusson region which has worked with artists such as Picasso, Miro, Leger and Sutherland (for Coventry).

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Ecclesiart, Ecclesiart Batch 3 Stuart Hillcock Ecclesiart, Ecclesiart Batch 3 Stuart Hillcock

Chris Gollon: Stations of the Cross

In 2000 Gollon was commissioned to paint 14 Stations of the Cross for the Church of St John on Bethnal Green, a grade one listed building designed by Sir John Soane. This was one of the largest commissions by the Church of England in recent times. Although previously Gollon was not best known for his religious work, the Rector Alan Green explained, "The church of St John on Bethnal Green has had a long-standing involvement with people on the fringes of our society, the sort of people who often figure in Chris' paintings.

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Ecclesiart, Ecclesiart Batch 3 Stuart Hillcock Ecclesiart, Ecclesiart Batch 3 Stuart Hillcock

Alison Watt: Still

“ … There is a sense of latency and loss in the painting; but it also establishes a feeling of hope, a sense that, against all hope, hope yet remains.

"It also speaks a quite personal word to me,  and many like me in today’s world, for whom the old ways of speaking about God have lost their power and immediacy.  Still suggests an absence that is strangely like a presence.”

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Ecclesiart, Ecclesiart Batch 1 Laura Moffatt Ecclesiart, Ecclesiart Batch 1 Laura Moffatt

James Dougall: Hanging Pyx

Hanging Pyx was finished and installed in 2011. It is constructed from fabricated Gilding Metal and nickel plated hot forged copper. The whole piece is 96 cm high and hangs 5 feet above the altar in the Lady Chapel at Holy Trinity. It works on a rise and fall mechanism located 8 metres up in the eaves of the roof, utilising 50 metres of 1.5 mm diameter stainless steel cabling.

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