The ecumenical tutors include quilter
Jackie Smith (right) and
Dr Chris Joby who has harnessed theology and fine art to explore the deep issues of faith. Both will be helping to strengthen and promote Christian learning with their courses at
Norwich Cathedral this spring.
Jackie’s quilts are colourful, pictorial landmarks of her journey with God and a living message for others at cathedrals and art galleries across the UK. With a developing talent for textiles, she has charted the contours of her faith through heartache, trial and joy. Jackie is also a popular speaker and passes on her skills at various workshops that will include the
Norwich Centre for Christian Learning course on
March 12.
Jackie’s labour of love began over three decades ago when she joined neighbouring quilt makers at the chapel near her former
Dorset home. She helped make 24 quilts and she became the proud owner of two of them. Although she moved to
Southampton and
Wales, the
Isle of Wight and
Norfolk, when her husband became a Methodist minister, Jackie’s quilt making continued. She practised her art and found a new, alternative niche for her faith that has opened doorways at secular and Christian exhibitions across the country.
“I can usually picture the completed quilts in my mind’s eye but they often change before I finish,” says Jackie, who spends a year planning each design. Worked with silk, sheer, velvet and brocade fabrics and glistening metallic’s, most are also painted, dyed and sewn by hand and machine.
“People quite often see things that I have not seen as the quilts say something to them and that is what they are about,” says Jackie, from
Coney Weston near
Thetford.
Her quilt making took a new direction when she moved to Wales and saw the breathtaking Snowdon scenery from the manse where she lived. The area was also steeped in Celtic spirituality and she felt the pilgrimage treks were a reflection of her own life journey. It soon became the focus for her first spiritual quilt called Pereindota with Celtic symbols of Church and eternity and the misty grey colours of Wales.
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Creation by Jackie Smith
Stars like spangles stitched across
The dark velvet cloth of night.
Planets like sequins
Reflecting the light
of blinding gold-white silk.
At the heart of our Universe,
The Sun
giving warmth, light and life.
In our hearts
The Son
bringing warmth, love and life.
Our heartbeats:
Our life.
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“I have always found God in creation,” says Jackie who has since made eight quilts depicting creation, which have also inspired some accompanying prose.
Now she is busy experimenting with a quilted journal and quilting trees in a new ‘Revelation’ series “to explore a gradual revealing of God alongside the heartache of being a distance carer for my daughter who suffers mental health problems,” says Jackie.
The dark, winter artistry will change, as the series unfolds with joy and hope. “During the darkness God takes us through our trials and temptations and when we get to rock bottom we discover that the rock is God, as we are rooted in him,” says the textile artist who found great help through the MIND Carer Support service.
Jackie is leading a
Network (Methodist Women in Britain) District Conference on
March 26 at
Belsey Bridge Conference Centre, Ditchingham and her Norwich quilting workshop through the Norwich Centre for Christian Learning in available on March 12 (10am to 4pm, £20, including materials.)
Dr Chris Joby’s six week course,
Theology and the Arts, begins on
March 3 (7-9pm) and is followed by a one-day study of
The Passion in Art on
April 18.
“Engaging with art in this way often opens up questions that are central to faith,” explains Dr Joby who studied at
Oxford and
Durham Universities and wrote his PhD thesis on the relationship between theology and fine art in the Reformed tradition.
The six two-hour sessions (£50) focus on diverse artists, poets and short story writers such as
Rembrandt, Elizabeth Jennings and
Chekhov, who used the pen or paintbrush to depict their faith. The one-day course from 10am – 3pm (£20) brings a new awareness to the Easter Story with paintings from the Last Supper to the crucifixion by Flemish Primitives, Venetian masters and artists from the Dutch and Spanish Golden Ages.
For information about the Norwich Centre for Christian Learning workshops contact: Gudrun Warren, 12 The Close, Norwich, NR1 4DN, 01603 218327
www.cathedral.org.uk/learning. For general quilting enquiries contact:
jackie.ks@hotmail.co.uk