The Friends made a grant of £10,000 towards the REBUILD arts project sponsored by the City of Culture Trust with the Cathedral, and the Broken Angel Project is one part of the sponsored art.
The 'Broken Angel' project sees a sequence of new site-specific works temporarily replacing the ‘Angel of the Eternal Gospel’, a figure in John Hutton’s great glass ‘West Screen’ destroyed in an act of vandalism in 2020.
The third and last artist in the series is Abigail Reynolds. Abigail is developing her ideas with Coventry Young Carers and the Cathedral arts team. The result is being presented in autumn – winter 2022, along with a related programme of activities.
Abigail has a studio in St Ives in Cornwall. Her recent projects include ‘Tre; a window for Cornwall’ 2022, a permanent commission at Kresen Kernow the Cornish Archive, and ‘Flux; turning a beach into glass’ a solo exhibition at Kestle Barton Gallery 2022. Her work is currently in British Art Show 9, the landmark touring exhibition organised every five years by Hayward Gallery Touring, on show in Manchester over the summer, then Plymouth this autumn.
In her approach to the new work, Abigail is thinking about the attempt to enter the sacred space of the cathedral by breaking the glass screen. She is re-imagining the broken panel as an opening door; an invitation to enter.
“The broken panel showed a traditional image of an angel in human form. An angel represents a portal to a different plane of consciousness, and might also be imagined simply as an opening. I am thinking of the shafts of light which pierce the sacred space of the cathedral. They make slanting shapes on the tapestry wall, like opening doors that move with the light.”
Abigail is also showing other work within the Cathedral, relating to the book in the hands of the broken angel, and creating a way to find different points of contact in the spaces of Cathedral.