A TINY Northumberland church has pipped three cathedrals, including Durham and Canterbury, to a national award for art in a religious context.
St John’s Church on the Healey estate, near the village of Riding Mill, won the award for two new windows designed by North East artists James Hugonin and Anne Vibeke Mou.
The competition is run every two years by an organisation called Art & Christianity Enquiry (ACE), which works in the field of religion and the visual arts.
A panel of judges chaired by the Very Rev Nicholas Frayling, Dean of Chichester, chose the Healey windows from a shortlist of five installations, including The Transfiguration Window by Thomas Denny at Durham Cathedral and Transport, designed by Antony Gormley, at Canterbury Cathedral.
Artworks at Guildford Cathedral and St John the Baptist Church, Hellington, Norfolk, were also shortlisted.
The Healey windows were commissioned by the parochial church council to commemorate Julian and Virginia Warde-Aldam, who worshipped in the church for more than 40 years until their deaths in 2005 and 2006 respectively.
Their son, Jamie, who is a church warden at St John’s and a patron of the arts, is a descendant of the founders of the Healey estate in the early 19th Century.
Last night he said: “I went to the awards evening in London with my son because being shortlisted was an honour in itself.
“When the chairman of the judges went through the decision-making process, it began to dawn on me that we were in with a big chance because he was saying all sorts of incredibly nice things.
“But then he said there had been a problem because one of the judges hadn’t been able to visit St John’s at Healey because it was too far from where he lived. My heart sank.”
But then it soared again as the little church was announced as the winner.
“We were delighted,” said Mr Warde-Aldham.
He explained that it hadn’t been his idea to commission windows in memory of his parents but he had chosen the artists and had been alerted to the competition by a gallery owner in Edinburgh.
James Hugonin, who is based near the Cheviot hills and specialises in musically-inspired abstract paintings, designed the window in memory of his father.
Anne Vibeke Mou, who is Danish but has lived in Newcastle since 2006, designed the window in memory of his mother. Yesterday she said: “I spent three months hand engraving the window which is very, very subtle. It hovers between being there and not being there so it is rather ghostly.”
She said her work usually began with “a ritual of mark making” out of which an image would begin to appear.
“I’ve worked with glass before and it is a bit of an industrial process. But I wanted to capture the immediacy of drawing.”
The two windows were installed last summer in the church which was built in 1860 for the use of people on the estate. In winning the competition, each artist receives £1,500 and the church gets £1,000 which Mr Warde-Aldham said would probably go towards the heating bill.
He said the vicar of the church, the Rev David Irvine, had been “very supportive” of the plan to install the two artists’ windows in place of the previous plain glass ones.
ACE gives out three awards every two years, the others being for architecture and a book.
