London, UK — This Lent, Stations of Life: the Way of the Cross opens a space for reflection. It invites all — believer, sceptic, seeker — to pause before the translucency of the glass and recognise their own “moments of grace” caught in the light. The opening evening on 22 March extends this summons into a sensory welcome — the community’s lived experiences will be joined by ambient sound and the scents of the wider world.
Following months deep in the congregation’s life, Anna Kiparis has mapped the parallels between Christ’s Passion and the “personal crucifixions” borne by people today. From those shared reflections of trial and grace she has forged new works in glass — contemporary pieces that root the ancient narrative into the actual history of the London community; the Stations that belong as much to the people who spoke as to the artist who shaped them.
The ordinary has entered the canon. Standing in dialogue with the church’s original Victorian paintings of the Fourteen Stations, the new creations force an unlikely symmetry across the church: the canonical and the witnessed face each other.
The choice of glass carries its own history. Having lost much of its original stained glass during the Blitz, Emmanuel has kept the “ghost windows” of the 20th century. Kiparis’s commission answers the loss: light and colour flooding back into the nave in permanent form that honours the architecture’s scars while illuminating its future.
Witness your own story canonised.
Stations of Life: the Way of the Cross is a major site-specific commission by the artist Anna Kiparis in collaboration with Revd Dr Catriona Laing that inhabits the Grade II-listed Emmanuel Church West Hampstead throughout Lent.
Curator: Il Gurn
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