St Philips School Odd Down Bath. Hall Stone Carvings

St Philips is a church school and the Christian faith informs its operation and this lead the governors of the school to discussed with the architect their need to visually define the new building in a Christian context. There was a desire to express this faith in a permanent way in the new building that not only said, “this is a Christian school”, but also had some thing to say about the Christian life. So the idea was born of carving several panels around the building to carry out this function and because of my experience with community art projects and my commitment to Christian art I was asked to be involved fairly early on.

Because of constraints on the budget Mr Desmond Barry the architect has had to scale down the number of panels to two. One is an exterior frieze over the west doorway, and one is inside in the reception area mirroring the entrance.

Both are substantial panels allowing for a major work. We are fortunate enough to have been funded for the stone. The county have paid for the exterior panel, which is now in position and the school is funding the interior panel, which is due to be fixed soon.
As you can see the idea is to carve the panels insitu so that I will be in residence for the duration of the work, and I can interact with the children through talks and projects. The theme for the interior panel is the story of the fish and loaves, which is associated with St Philip the patron saint of the church and school. This is a good story for the children to be involved and included in. The exterior panel will show the creation. We hope that the children will learn both stories, be aware of the Christian faith, and see how a sculpture is carved in stone. Thus leaving a lasting impression with them and a lasting statement of our faith in the fabric of the school.

At my own school back in the sixties there were some beautiful paintings done under supervision by the students. My school was rather special because although it was a secondary modern, it had a dedicated art course with in it, giving students 12 lessons of art per week. The schools head master in the fifties was George Mackley one of Britain’s foremost wood engravers. So you can imagine these paintings that surrounded every classroom door from dado to ceiling, the whole length of the corridor were of a particularly high standard. I tell you this because I want to explain the impact of these works that we saw each day as we lined up to start a new lesson.

They were pictures of bible stories The wedding feast at Canna and the raising of Lazarus but they were in modern dress and settings and each picture had children in our school uniform taking part. The wedding feast particularly impressed me and I have a clear image of it to this day. It was set in an English country garden with a colourful; marquee and dancing children in summer uniform. It gave me a felling of well being and security as we waited to face another impenetrable forty five minutes of maths.

It is this idea of telling the story of the “Feeding of the five thousand”
in a contemporary setting that will draw the viewers in and intrigue them that excites me. Even if the story is not understood completely the image is stored for reference later. Like me I would like a person to remember the carving in their school entrance long afterwards and perhaps ponder on its significance.