St Peter & St Paul Farningham

Word Cross installed in St Peter & St Paul Farningham
2011

From the artist's statement

I first exhibited this Word Cross at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition of 1997. Caroline Gould, a parishioner of Farningham, a small village in Kent, showed a great interest in securing it for her church, even though it is an expensive and doctrinally controversial object. I can only too readily imagine what efforts of planning and persuasion led, after many months of discussion, to its eventual acquisition in 2011. There was just time for me to have it shipped back from New York where it had been on show, and delivered to Farningham church on the Thursday of Easter Week. Luckily the installation (at a spot we had worked out together with the help of paper models) could be effected in the few hours before the appropriate Good Friday service for its dedication. The picture shows that it will soon look as if, simultaneously modern and medieval, it has always been there.

Editor's note: The large installation, Golgotha (of which this cross forms the centre section) is now on view as part of the Francesca and Massimo Valsecchi collection, Palazzo Butera, Palermo.