Andy Marshall's Genius Loci Digest: 13 Nov 26

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Photo-hoard

Sainte Chapelle, Paris? No, Itchen Stoke in Hampshire.

Words

“They say a goldfish will only get as big as its bowl. But when you put it in a tank, the space can change the way it grows. It needs to have the room or its potential doesn’t show. So its environment’s essential for unleashing the unknown.” - IN-Q, Goldfish.

Observations

Eight years have passed since I last came to Brownshill. I carry something of those years with me as I return to St Mary of the Angels: the memory of my first visit, but also everything that has happened since, including the changes in the person who stands here today.

And through those same years, as a pandemic, wars, natural disasters and politics have touched our lives, other human beings have found the resolve to care for this building. Amid all that upheaval, they have helped this small corner of the world move in the opposite direction - towards repair, renewal and welcome.

I feel so privileged to be here again: to observe, to reassess, to have time to absorb and contemplate, and to witness the granular impact of people and place. These are things that often live beneath the surface of everyday life, beyond the front page and the social media trending box.

On that first visit, I came up the steep and winding lanes to photograph St Mary of the Angels before sunrise. I hefted all my gear over to the spot in front of the church to capture it during the golden hour. Whilst I was setting up my camera - for the briefest moment - the lichen on the building seemed to glow on the cusp of dawn. I didn’t have time to photograph it, but I was so enthralled by what I saw that I later made what I call a lichenograph.

I called the building The Holy Host - host not just because of its religious connotations, but also because it offers a home to other living things. As well as the lichen, I photographed a loveliness of ladybirds clinging to the stained glass. This building is a welcome for all creeds and breeds, feathers, fur and seeds, and the lichens that have made a life upon its walls.

During that visit, photographing the church felt like a dream. Perhaps guided by that first flush of colour, I captured some individual lichens on my camera. One that remained in my memory was a particular patch on the quoin of the north wall.

Now, after photographing the church again at dusk, I head out to that same corner and look for it. Seeing it again lights a touchpaper of recognition - here is an emotional marker, still holding fast to the stone. To my eye, it has hardly changed at all.

There is a poem by Maria Popova, The Wildest Bet Is the Winning Bet, in which she writes of the miracle of life - of “mitochondria and music”, of “mountains and minds”, of the journey “from trilobite to telescope”. Then she brings us to “the unhurried orange lichen growing on the black boulder two hundred times more slowly than the tectonic plates beneath are drifting apart”.

The lichen lives in a different time-scale, a different dimension, another rhythm. There’s something profoundly grounding in that. Little did I know that this small disc of yellow would become an attachment in my life, something I would carry with me after the moment I first left it - folded away in the valves of memory, ready to bloom again upon my return eight years later.

The second lichen photograph has become more than the sum of its parts - a measure of me, of my life since I was last here. I think of the distance between the two images: how I have grown older and, I hope, a little wiser; how the world, to me, seems to have grown more divided. But the lichen has held fast. It has simply lived - a miraculous thing that exists through different organisms making a life together.

And it wasn’t just the lichen that I photographed eight years apart. When I first came here, I took a photograph of myself beneath the gallery in the raking light. When I take another today and compare the two, I feel tender about getting older. There is a distance between these portraits that I can see in my face and feel in the person looking back at them.

I find solace in the simple, cool space of the interior, going about my work in light that feels like a blessing.

Its visual purity bursts the greasy bubble of the present and leaves my ego at the door. Standing here, in the coloured light of an early morning, I feel as though I’m in the marrow of it all.

Here I think of all that is happening and begin to see it for what it is. I feel unfettered, uncluttered, unburdened - the building, the lichen and me, a coming together of dimensions and the shedding of self.

To visit Brownshill is to step into a different realm. It’s the space and its story, the light and the loci, the survival and renewal, the material and the spiritual, the lichen and the ladybird, the visits, the photographs and me. There are different ways of existing here, different measures of time, held within the same small place.

I don’t think I could live well in difficult times without places like this. Even as those photographs make the years between them visible, this building wraps itself around me like a comfort blanket. Here I am matter, capable of noticing the universe, feeling loss, making art and loving another being. Through the resolve of those who care for it, this building continues to offer a home to other lives; and in making room for mine, it has given me room to grow.

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Hotspots

St. Mary, Brownshill, Gloucestershire.

Overlooking Gloucestershire’s Golden Valley, St Mary of the Angels, Brownshill, opened in 1937. Designed by W. D. Caröe for a healing community founded by two First World War nurses, this Grade II listed church has stained glass by Douglas Strachan and is cared for by the Friends of Friendless Churches.

Nurses Bertha Kessler and Katherine Hudson each gave £1,000 to build Brownshill’s St Mary of the Angels. Traumatised by the First World War, they devoted themselves to spiritual healing. Douglas Strachan’s sanctuary windows commemorate the founders and a benefactor: rare examples of his stained glass for a Roman Catholic church.

For more information please visit the Friends of Friendless Churches site:

Atelier

I’d like to introduce you to my new Atelier - a growing selection of photographs and watercolours, seen through my lens or defined by my hand for sale as digital prints. It’s been a work in progress over the last few months, in between travels and commissions.

Most of these works were made during the eight years between my visits to Brownshill. Looking back at them, I see something of my own journey, and how far we’ve come together over the years of the Digest. I’m taken by how lucky I am to have visited these places - and by what a remarkably diverse country I live in.

I’ve painstakingly added the story behind each image, too, so the Atelier offers something to everyone who visits. You can explore the places, follow their stories and discover what drew me to photograph or paint them, whether you wish to purchase or simply enjoy looking around. And if one of these places has stayed with you, perhaps you’ll find something here to bring a little of its spirit into your home.

Click the link below to see my Atelier:

Andy Marshall's Picture Room

There is also a Picture Room where you can have fun adding and re-sizing some of my prints on a wall:

Van Life

Brownshill was visited during my Faces and Sacred Springs field trip and you can see the fully realised journey here:

On My Coffee Table

BOOKMARKED

FILM AND SOUND

THE RABBIT HOLE

My first visit to Brownshill:

I can tell you, that from the very moment I saw it happen, I knew that my days work would be blessed with its happening. 👇

A similar occurrence at Hexham:

On a day spent groping in darkness, tethered to a remote release, I discovered something utterly wondrous and remarkable. Out of the darkness, light emerged—light that nature had carefully cultivated over centuries, harvested and stored for its own ends.