My Cloisters Crush
Craft, quiet, and the curious comfort of churches (with a small c)
All collage imagery my own except: Alexander McQueen AW96, Condé Nast Archive; Tanner Fletcher by Lawrence De Leon / Alex Frank; Anna Hodgson, Harry Darby; Dadle
Candleglow against stone, slubby linen against velvet, incense against dustlight.
It was heading into one of the bleaker parts of the first lockdown. I was reading Nigel Slater’s The Christmas Chronicles: part cookbook, part insight into his understated and sensorial domestic life.He was describing choosing candles for the season and vividly described one, Carmélite by Cire Trudon, that evoked the “scent of ancient stone-walls, in the shade of cloisters and convents, this fragrance of fresh and mossy stone narrates the black and white silhouettes of nuns walking through the silence of a ritual mass.”
A bell was chiming in my memory, or my imagination, from the confines of my Deptford flat. I wanted to be in that space – calm, ethereal, purposeful. I bought the candle; there was nothing else to spend my money on! And in the smallness of those siloed December and early January days, I hunkered down further into the gloom, but now with a scent that felt like it justified and marked my enforced covenant of solitude.
Image: Visit to "Paddy's Wigwam" the Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King in Liverpool, England, September 2020
This connection to cloisters, to churches and spaces of congregation I have noticed, is something that seems to be bubbling up to the surface again – for me, and I think others. It’s a link to spirituality and the serene that feels secretly rebellious against the now almost mainstream celebration of other types of otherworldly, occult and magic that we have been enjoying in the past few years; that of the cosmic, natural and ancestral wisdom.
I read recently that Silvia Federici, in her book Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, said witchiness has become accepted because belief in magic ways no longer threatens social order but instead coexists with modern structures. We have seen this link to outsider folk thinking become a touchstone in contemporary life – Ithell Colquhoun celebrated at Tate St Ives, brands like Heresy and Ffern are drawing upon ancient British lore to connect to modern age audiences. Other ways of being, rooting nature into a daily practice, have been brought out from the dark and into the light.
All collage imagery my own, including imagery of Ithell Colquhoun at Tate, except: Heresy SS23 Old Growth; Interspecies Gossip, Grow Your Own Cloud.
Our celebration of this type of spirituality is about ecosystems and intuition, acknowledging messiness, or unknowable intelligence outside human control. It makes sense to many who seek connection to higher powers and mystery that aren’t ruled by hierarchy or patriarchy – though increasingly, some of this has been reduced to shorthand or co-opted in more commercial settings.
So why then, might I be looking to organised religious spaces for inspiration, and even escape or comfort?
Design maven
recently reflected on her obsession with Catholicism – entangled with her own upbringing and childhood memories and fictional lores from nineties and noughties pop culture: Buffy, Twilight – and how its symbols and ornate trappings that have made it onto TikTok. She wondered, “If mainstream culture is areligious, pro-sex, and feminist, Catholicism, and all its asceticisms, sure start to seem like the counterculture.”It’s tricky. Perhaps it is this power play between good and evil running through the stories and the practice of Christianity that makes it so alluring to both elevate and desecrate in creative practice and culture. With so many, for so long, not welcomed into the Church, it holds fascination for some, and a repugnance for many – this duality can be intoxicating when used in storytelling as it tells a story about human nature. So ‘uncool’, yet full of desire, affirmation and power.
Using the symbolism of Christianity is still a common emotive starting place – just recently, genderless RTW brand Tanner Fletcher hosted a showcase of their queer and vintage-inspired wedding wear in St. Paul’s German Evangelical Lutheran Church, coinciding with the 10-year anniversary of legalising same-sex marriage. The designers chose the venue to double down on the spectacle of the wedding and reclaim the beauty of these traditions whilst defiantly celebrating queer love. Tiarna Meehan reflected at Dazed on their own olfactory evocations around church spaces and queer identity – “the tension between reverence and discomfort”.
My noticing churches in culture – churches with a little c, rather than the Institution as a whole – is a bit more more C of E. It’s more pared back than the brash Catholic and Baptist spaces that have dominated culture’s relationship with Christianity over the past few decades, and definitely less loaded with complexity; my privilege, for sure.
In the UK, most people will have had some experiences with a church. Whether at their Church of England primary school, festooned with cotton wool or drying-up towels as sheep and shepherds in the nativity, or as a stopping-off point when tramping through the country on a long weekend; sticking your head through a creaking wooden door to see what’s underneath the spire, reading a laminated card that tells you a little more of the bell ringers and which so-and-so Lord or Lady is interred below your feet. Wander into the right church, and it’s like going to a National Trust property – all the trappings of a historic house – candlestick! moulded wood! – without the keen volunteer asking you to sign up for a membership you likely won't use (unless you bump into the warden, of course).
Image: Visit to York Minster, November 2021
The vernacular of the local church is a visual world to be celebrated; its sweet parochial design language at once so sincere, made by local ladies during a coffee morning, and so laden with powerful imagery ritualised by religious folk that trod – still tread? – the winding path to worship with their community, week in, week out. It is this commitment to a central place, to convene, decorate and share together, that seems such a draw to me now – to connect so regularly with a community, but at the same time search for a link to something bigger and unknowable.
My Nana used to ‘do the flowers’ for her local church; bringing golden kangaroo’s foot and alstroemeria bought at Morrisons together in fantastically Constance Spry-esque arrangements that would sit in pairs of the chicest 1940s silvered vases astride the altar. On visits outside the city I have seen a Daffodil Festival take over one parish spot, with incredible displays of yellow weaving in and out of pews and pillars alongside surreal sculptures made by locals, and in another church, humble yet incredibly artful hangings celebrating community fishermen and their connection with the sea. And on craggy hill sides in Greece and Spain I have escaped the beating sun by tiptoeing into cool and silent spaces with delicate votives and burning incense next to worn brooms and old rusty fans, glowing holiness next to the mundanity of upkeep. For me, sanctuary is found in these strange installations and effortless, and sometimes unintentional, artistic vignettes pointing us to hope and reflection.
Images: Small church on Syros, Greece, 2018; Mawgan en Meneage Church, Cornwall, February 2019
Hymn boards, carvings on gravestones, gilded engravings, jewel-like stained glass.
This is the vernacular of Christian Folk, the everyday people who come to worship humbly in these spaces rooted in their community.
Where is the enjoyment found in these excursions to parish pockets for others? Like the equivalent accounts celebrating our more ethereal and pagan roots – Stone Club or The Witching Museum – celebrations of Christian folk have an equivalent in The Church Kneeler Archive; celebrating cross stitch beauties that include baby owls, or Mickey Mouse. Rob Andrews’ Church Crawling is a similar pilgrimage to designer Luke Edward Hall of Chateau Orlando’s #churchquesting series – peeking behind the doors of buildings with pious names like St Mary Magdalene and St Bartholomew's. For Hall, he’s surely informing his romantic visual world with heraldic heroes and scrolling forms. Visit Lincoln and you will see Duncan Grant’s fae like St Blaise murals, or Westminster Chapel to see Hockney’s primary powered Queen Elizabeth II window – there is much to see behind closed doors. The magnificent and the mundane.
For me, it’s returning to something that has remained largely unchanged. Still spaces, literally, against the backdrop of a noisy and chaotic life that seem to, miraculously, be everywhere. Imagine your phone going off whilst sat in the pews – gah! These are spaces that force us away from the noise and to something both familiar, predictable, and yet… depending on our own relationship with religion, a sense of sacred solemnity that is rare to find elsewhere.
At the core of my attraction to all this is the combined stillness and stature of these spaces designed for contemplation and reverie, achieved largely due to architectural sensibilities that repeat in the buildings – Saxon or Gothic styling. Like my attraction to my candle, others are turning to these evocative material and visual qualities.
Jermaine Gallacher’s latest show Þe Sellokest Swyn responded to the curator’s interest in deconsecrated monasteries, so The Ragged School was turned into a non-secular escape just away from the boom of Borough Road. The sanctity of the room’s marvellous plaster walls matched with a heavy stone table carrying Gala Colivet Dennison’s delicate silver candlestick, and Ben Burgis’ striking oil paintings that depict symbols of medieval tales and Bible stories. Alongside Miranda Keyes’ chalice-like glassware that seemed to slip through the air and Ralph Parks’ undulating wood-carved furniture, the space seemed to all but hum with organ groan and sermon echo. At the center of the space, Emma Sheridan’s Winged Font Table, a gilded sculptural form, invited you to find something to pray about.
Image: Ben Burgis and Ralph Parks in Þe Sellokest Swyn, 2025
Image: Miranda Keyes in Þe Sellokest Swyn, 2025
To be around these pieces felt special – the makers' dedication apparent, their commitment to drawing out objects of design sanctity from stone, wood and glass. Scale, form and image reflected each artist’s connection to something churchlike – whether rooted in real medieval reference or conjured from personal imagination.
These church-like references I doubt will go mainstream – we won’t see a collaboration between St Botolph’s and MADE.com. The connection is too loaded. In brand, Lucky Saint leans into the Trappist typography, and whilst challengers Saintly have brought frescos and porticos into their wet wipe brand (?!), these nods feel more about the idea of religion than the spaces they inhabit – the ways of thinking and doing in Christianity rather than the places for being and experiencing.
Modern interpretations of the church (little c) vernacular that have chimed with my cloister crush seem to be much more focused in the vernacular rather than the message. Design studio Harry Darby uses calligraphic letterforms and fresco styled image making, whilst Dadle’s beautiful interior lights are like stained glass for one. Georgia Kemball’s precious trinkets include cherubic forms that could protect any modern day wearer, and at Lamb Gallery, artist Alma Berrow presented a long table drenched in candle wax that felt like the ultimate altar to conviviality.
These nods are more humble than recreating the grand spaces of a Wren or McQueen’s Dante show – less about a big moral lesson, or divine inspiration, and more about creating a sense of preciousness or ritual.
My own fascination with conjuring these spaces is about a vestigial quality. Margot Henderson said of her new pub project in an interview with Toogood, “I like to think it’s quite Vermeer, you know – little wooden table and a candle.” Just like my local churches. Specific light, something placed with intention. A space to gaze at nothing and tune in or tune out. A place to be with one's thoughts, to think of oneself, or others. A place to commune.
When interviewing ex-Airbnb exec Aisling Hassell for a project recently, she reflected to me how churches used to be at the center of community in Ireland, but now, younger people don’t gather there – she wondered whether that’s why people are seeking out spaces like her latest wellbeing venture, Dāha.
What used to be the mainstay of a weekly schedule - people stuffed into pews for the Sunday sermon, rites of passage at different ages and life stages – has now become, for my generation, an anachronistic fascination to be explored outside the historical trappings of worship and culture that Christianity likely represented for our parents' generation and before.
We wondered, could churches have the potential to become ‘third spaces’ once more?
Honestly, probably not. Christianity itself is going through somewhat of a rebrand over the past few years – the Revs Kate Bottley and Richard Coles doing their darndest to make Christ cool; and at my annual festive Christingle service, quizzes and CGI animations were used to gain relevance for a somewhat confused congregation. The religion continues to clamour to find a voice in contemporary culture against a backdrop of scandal and increased atheism.
For me, lessons and inspiration are held away from the people –the leaders, the preachers – and in looking at the places and spaces created and held by those that follow; the spaces that still endure.
In the design world, I have often come across and used the phrase ‘Cathedral thinking’ – the idea that we should be thinking beyond our generation and investing in the long term. You might begin to build something, but expect not to see the end, yet believe in the investment all the same.
It might be trite to say, but I wonder if many of us are turning to objects, ideas, stories and materials that give us this sense, creatively, and can justify our commitment to craft and a practice against a backdrop of plug-in-and-play manufacturing and construction, AI image generation and globalised design aesthetics. To be in a building that was built for future generations, with artwork that tunes into local stories of heroism and community, and that employed the materials to match, feels special when so often I find myself in design-by-algorithm workspaces and restaurants, seeing skylines of flat and polished skyscrapers in materials that have been through fifteen processes. They really don’t make them like they used to.
My draw to these organised religious spaces – whether sitting in the reverie of modernist stained glass at ‘Paddy's Wigwam’ or in a ten pew parish pocket – without, like for many of us I assume, the Christian practice – is to experience these places as monuments to craft and storytelling. As nodes of connection and reflection. Spaces we are largely still free to enter and be surrounded by objects and furniture that have been used to decorate the divine, and so call us to notice something beyond ourselves. A call to reverence not to God but to the act of creating with care, meaning – with our human selves. But really, my draw is simple – it’s a reminder of how to make headspace for creative inspiration to strike.
To just light a candle, place it amongst other revered objects, and try and remember how to sit still.
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