Ghislaine Howard:

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The Stations of The Cross: The Captive Figure
at Liverpool Anglican Cathedral

The Empty Tomb in Liverpool Cathedral

Featuring the unveiling of The Empty Tomb, a new work for Liverpool Anglican Cathedral's Capital of Culture celebrations.

The Stations was on view from February 11 to March 30, 2008.
The Empty Tomb played a central role in the Cathedral's Easter celebrations and will remain on view until the end of 2008.

The Empty Tobmb

The Empty Tomb

Last Easter artist Ghislaine Howard spent a number of early mornings walking the city streets of Liverpool sketching and photographing the spaces vacated by rough sleepers. These empty doorways, tousled blankets,
and damp cardboard boxes the only evidence that someone had found shelter there. Her purpose was to situate her painting of The Empty Tomb in the reality of the lived experience and to bring to this spiritual subject a
simple human dimension. The resulting painting, 4 x 8 feet, is set within a spectacular steel reliquary created by sculptor Brian Fell and is the culminating piece of her series Stations of the Cross: the Captive Figure.

The series has toured various British cathedrals to great acclaim. When it was shown at Gloucester Cathedral, Her Majesty the Queen was presented with
a study for The Women of Jerusalem for the Royal Collection.

It is fitting that this powerful and thought-provoking exhibition should follow the Cathedral's recent Anne Frank exhibition for they speak of the disappeared, the dispossessed and the homeless, those undergoing unfair
captivity and worse - above all they speak of the strength of the human spirit to transcend oppression.

These significant and powerful works open up opportunities to highlight and explore the issue of torture and the plight of victims of oppression all over the world. And as one of many visitors seeing the paintings wrote in
response to the works, "It hurt my heart. I pray that we learn from this suffering."

Dan Jones, Head of Education for Amnesty International:

"Ghislaine Howard's images are compelling, powerful, and emphatic. They are unusual in that they communicate man's inhumanity to man to the art lover and lay person alike. These are very important paintings that transcend the limitations of the gallery space to speak to us all."

Dr Helen Bamber, (former director of the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture):

"Ghislaine Howard's Stations have a passionate roughness that calls out to the viewer the meaning of Christ's suffering. They seem sublimely right for the pain and confusion of Christ's Passion."

Sister Wendy Beckett:
"Howard is well on her way to becoming one of the great humanist artists of our time."

Death's Broken Dominion (PDF) - Laura Gascoigne on The Empty Tomb
(The Tablet, March 22, 2008)

The Stations have been featured a number of times on television, most recently in BBC1 documentary, Who Do You Say I Am?, and were the setting for a major new production of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies's Vesalii Icones, to celebrate his seventieth birthday.

Ghislaine's 365 series, a sequence of daily paintings relating to news media images, will be shown at Imperial War Museum North in February 2009 and may be seen on her blog.

2007

Ghislaine has been involved in a number of exciting projects over this past year. As well as her regular showings at the Cynthia Corbett Gallery, she has also been involved with the seventieth birthday celebrations of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies - the Queen's Composer. To celebrate this occasion a number of concerts were staged around the country including a two week festival of his music at the Royal Festival Hall.

Ghislaine worked with the extraordinarily gifted dancer Michael Rolnick, the avant-garde musical ensemble Psappha and the ENO director and choreographer Elaine Tyler Hall to create a new interpretation of the composer's 1969 dance piece, Vesalii Icones. The dance routine was inspired by Ghislaine's work and features the dancer who, to the music of a single cello, responds to Ghislaine's works which are projected above him. Future collaborations are in the pipeline.

She has been commissioned by the Liverpool Anglican Cathedral to produce a large altarpiece, The Empty Tomb. Ghislaine has been inspired by the remnants of sleeping bags and blankets that she had seen in empty shop doorways around our large cities. It promises to be a major work that, as is the artist's major concern, speaks at once to a religious and secular audience.

Together with a piece by Tracey Emin, Ghislaine's work will be one of the major highlights of the Cathedral's European Capital of Culture 2008 celebrations.

She was also honoured by being the first contemporary artist to be commissioned to produce The Washing of the Feet, a new work for the Methodist Art Collection. The collection, based at Oxford Brookes University, is currently touring Britain.

The Washing of the Feet

Although Ghislaine is noted for her large powerful, evocative figure paintings, much of her work is founded upon a close scrutiny of her immediate scene, often developing form small intimate sketches and studies of herself and her family. Recently she has begun a series of paintings inspired by clothes that are imbued with memories, happy and sad - clothes that appear to have their own identities, their own stories to tell.

Following a recent commission Ghislaine has been inspired to produce a series of intimate contemplation pieces. These are either religious or secular in subject matter but have the same purpose - to give to the viewer a sense of calm, of meditative space. Some of these are small, jewel-like panels that can be slipped into a handbag or piece of luggage and can be carried around from place to place, to immediately humanise any interior and to give a sense of stillness and purpose amongst the bustle of contemporary life.

In October 2004, The Cynthia Corbett Gallery collaborated with the Sheridan Russell Gallery in Marylebone, which has led to a reawakening of critical interest in relation to Ghislaine's work concerning pregnancy and birth. Her paintings will be the focus of a chapter in a forthcoming publication on the subject of art in hospitals.

Forthcoming exhibitions

| Past work | The Stations of the Cross | Working methods |