Contemporary Artists and the Sacred Space: Victoria Rance, ‘Comforter’, 2008

Описание: Tyler Rollins and Laura Moffatt sit down with Victoria Rance to discuss her 2008 work, ‘Comforter’ which is in St Laurence, Catford.

Part of the Contemporary Artists and the Sacred Space: Conversations in London interview series. Presented by Foundation for Spirituality and the Arts and Art + Christianity.

Contemporary Artists and the Sacred Space is a new series of video interviews with artists, each centred on a single work of art situated within a place of worship in London, UK. The Foundation for Spirituality and the Arts (FSA) and Art + Christianity (A+C) have partnered on this initiative, with their respective directors, Tyler Rollins and Laura Moffatt, engaging the artists – Shirazeh Houshiary, Sir Christopher Le Brun, Graeme Mortimer Evelyn, and Victoria Rance – in shared questions and sustained curiosity.

Through these in-depth conversations, the series traces the conception, development, and realisation of each artwork, while attending closely to the particular challenges and possibilities of creating art for sacred spaces. Offering rare insight into this complex and collaborative process, the interviews reveal the artists’ creative practices alongside their reflections on the spiritual and religious dimensions of the works in question.

The selection of artworks was inspired by A+C’s online project Ecclesiart, which documents over 100 works of modern and contemporary art in churches, chapels, and cathedrals across the UK. During the summer of 2025, Rollins and Moffatt visited each site and conducted interviews with the artists in situ, with the exception of Houshiary, who was interviewed in her studio. The locations range from the internationally renowned St Martin-in-the-Fields on Trafalgar Square and the Faith Centre at the London School of Economics, to a striking 1960s church in south London and a newly built church–community space within a major development in Tottenham Hale.

In each context, the artist has realized a work that both animates and concentrates the spiritual character of its setting, while also asserting itself as an autonomous work of art. These dual qualities are central to the works featured in Ecclesiart and speak to the significance of such commissions—projects that, for many artists, represent a rare and formative opportunity within their practice.

Find out more about Art+Christianity at https://artandchristianity.org/; the FSA at https://fsa.art/; Victoria Rance http://www.victoriarance.com/ and St Laurence Catford https://www.stlaurencecatford.org.uk/