The Shelter in Wells Cathedral
The Shelter at Wells Cathedral
The Shelter was selected for Wells Art Contemporary 2026 as an installation for Wells Cathedral. Following the selection, I was invited to expand the original work and respond directly to the scale and architecture of the North Transept.
What began as a large-scale linocut gradually became something much larger and less fixed. For Wells Cathedral, the work was extended into a site-responsive installation made from hand-printed linocuts, Van Dyke prints, translucent fabrics, torn fragments and hand stitching.
The theme of this year’s installations, Time, felt particularly relevant to The Shelter. Time has always been physically embedded in the work. The original linocut required months of drawing, carving and hand printing. The expanded installation brings together slow, handmade methods and historical techniques including linocut, Van Dyke printing and hand stitching. Each leaves evidence of time spent with the material: carved marks, photographic traces, torn edges, stitches and repeated impressions.
But during the development of the work, another relationship with time began to emerge.
The original Shelter was built from a dense network of branches. I first approached this structure by observing it, drawing it and slowly learning its rules through carving. Over time the image became less stable. It moved onto translucent fabric, fragmented, overlapped and eventually began to fall apart.
For the final section of the Wells installation, I deliberately tore printed material into pieces and began building again.
This destruction was not an ending. It became a form of restoration.
I became interested in the way damaged systems recover, particularly forests and landscapes after disturbance. What returns is rarely an exact reconstruction of what existed before. New relationships form, different structures occupy the gaps and something recognisable, but changed, begins to grow.
The same happened within The Shelter. I stopped trying to reconstruct the original image and instead used its fragments as material for something new. Printed marks, transparent layers and hand stitching became elements of another network.
There was also a shift in my own position within the work. Earlier stages were concerned with observing and understanding existing networks. In the later sections, I began to construct them myself. The stitch became a line I could move, connect and redirect. Fragments could be repositioned. Empty spaces could remain empty. After learning the rules of the original structure, I found the freedom to build differently.
In this sense, The Shelter carries several forms of time at once: the physical time of making, the history held within its techniques and materials, the gradual transformation of an artwork over several years, and the more cyclical time of damage, recovery and regeneration.
Installed within the Gothic architecture of Wells Cathedral, the work enters another timescale entirely. Its fragile, lightweight and movable surface sits against stone that has survived for centuries. The architecture does not simply provide a background. It becomes part of the work, framing the installation while emphasising the contrast between permanence and change.
The Shelter no longer feels like a finished image to me.
It has become a structure capable of changing, breaking apart and being built again.
