An art installation measuring over 60 square metres will be officially opened to the public in St Michael’s Church on Camden Town on Thursday 4 December.
HS, by Maciej Urbanek, covers the entire west wall of the huge Victorian Church and could be one of the world’s largest photographic works.
The installation, which covers badly damaged plasterwork in a church still in need of a great deal of restoration, appears to the viewer to be a vast explosion of fabulous silvery light. However it is made from the most humble of materials – dustbin bags which the artist has arranged, lit and photographed such that a mundane material is transformed into a grand, majestic artwork.
Fr Philip North, the parish priest at St Michael’s, commented:
“This piece is the most amazing achievement and surely one of the most stunning pieces of art in Camden.
“For us as Christians, the fact that ordinary dustbin bags have been used to create something so overwhelmingly beautiful is a metaphor for God’s work in taking ordinary human lives and making them extraordinary.
“This is also part of our response as a Parish to Capital Vision 2020 and and its invitation to churches to be creative in engaging with the world of arts.
“What I like about it is that it is fearlessly contemporary and yet subtly references the tradition. In Baroque churches it was fashionable to have an image of divine light against the west wall, and Urbanek quotes that tradition but in a way that is entirely new and completely radical.”
St Michael’s Church is next to Sainsburys on Camden Road and HS can be viewed any afternoon when the Church is open to the public. There is no charge.
