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On completion of my commission in Cirencester, I was asked to give a talk on where I saw my work in the context of Christian art across the centuries. My thoughts have continued since then, and have been published in a much extended version by SLG Press.. Entitled The Road to Emmaus - a sculptor's journey through time, it is available from the publishers by emailing slgpress.co.uk (price £10).
More recently, I have been commissioned to produce a sculpture for my own parish church of St. Andrew. The maquette (destined to go to the church school) currently stands as a small sculpture at the side of the altar, and I have started work on the life-sized sculpture which will be installed at the entrance to the churchyard.
St. Andrew's is an unusual church, in that the church building has been shared with the Roman Catholic church of St. Cross since the 1980s. I wished to produce a sculpture which would celebrate this act of ecumenism by including both St. Andrew and the Cross. My thoughts for this began at the time Russia invaded the Ukraine, and it was significant for me that St. Andrew is a patron saint of both countries. My ideas continued to develop during the time of Hamas's act of slaughter and the ensuing horror in Gaza, and with the current problems in and around Iran. The sculpture's form and significance have been influenced by those events, and have resulted in an image of the maquette being included in a book called Poems on Conflict published by a writers' forum at St. Edmund Hall, Oxford. A fuller description of the sculpture's meaning is described in the conclusion of my Road to Emmaus, mentioned above, and further ideas in this summer's edition of the Fairacres Chronicle.
During the past year, I have written a number of articles for The Jackdaw art magazine. I have reviewed Charles Miller's The Spiritual Adventure of Henri Matisse for the Fairacres Chronicle, for which I have also produced an article entitled The Cross and Christian Faith; and was asked to produce a marginal note about the use of bronze in Solomon's temple for a new annotated edition of the Bible, recently published by the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity.