EARTH, WIND, AND FIRE
The Artistic Vision of Fenwick Lawson
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Durham-based sculptor Fenwick Lawson died peacefully on 23rd January at the age of 93. In 2008, I interviewed Fenwick in his cottage high above the banks of the River Wear in the centre of Durham. His daughter Anna had warned me that he tired easily and had some hearing loss, so I was prepared for a short interview that might need to be supplemented with other material to make it publishable. However, three hours later, I had a remarkably coherent narrative of Lawson’s life, work, and vision, and I also felt I had had a unique and privileged glimpse into the artist’s vocation in the service of God through the quest for beauty.
This is an edited version of my article based on that interview, which was published in Art & Christianity Journal in Spring 2009. I’m publishing an edited version here as a tribute to a man who was a visionary and gifted sculptor and a personal friend.1
Visitors to Durham will encounter a bronze sculpture in Millennium Square, titled The Journey, by Fenwick Lawson. It depicts a group of monks carrying an open coffin containing the body of St. Cuthbert, as they fled from the island of Lindisfarne during a Viking invasion and eventually ended up in Durham towards the end of the tenth century.2
When I interviewed Fenwick, his home environment seemed to have an organic relationship to his monumental wooden sculptures, such as the Pietà in the crypt of Durham Cathedral.
A soaring glass-fronted studio tacked onto the side accommodated his work in progress, while in a loft above, his wife Joan produced exquisite handmade quilts. She wanted to be there, she explained, while he was working with chain saws and other potentially dangerous equipment, so she had sculpted her own life and creativity around his art. His daughter, Anna, an artist and writer, dedicated much of her time to her father’s work, acting as a mediating presence, overseeing his interviews, managing his publicity and organising his diary.
The four of us sat around the table in the kitchen amidst the dense clutter of family mementoes and photographs, with a steady supply of tea and biscuits provided by Joan. But the appearance of domestic tranquillity was deceptive, for it masked the force of the art and the relentless determination of the artist, in the service of a vision that is vast, not only in the scale of the work but in its quest for the material expression of the inexpressible and the sublime, particularly in the context of Christian liturgical art.