Earth, Wind and Fire: Tina Beattie Explores the Artistic Vision of Fenwick Lawson (Interview) (Biography‪)‬

Visitors to Durham will encounter a bronze sculpture in Millennium Square, depicting 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. The sculpture, modelled on an earlier wooden sculpture, was unveiled by Princess Anne in September 2008. It is the work of sculptor Fenwick Lawson, and last year I interviewed him in his cottage high above the banks of the River Wear in the centre of Durham. His home environment seems to have an organic relationship to Lawson's monumental wooden sculptures such as the Pieta in Durham cathedral. A soaring glass-fronted studio tacked onto the side accommodates his work in progress, while in a loft above, his wife Joan produces exquisite handmade quilts. She wants to be there, she explained, while he is working with chain saws and other potentially dangerous equipment, and so she has sculpted her own life and creativity around his art. His daughter, Anna, an artist and writer, dedicates 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 amid 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 is deceptive, for it masks the force of the art and the relentless determination of the artist in the service of a vision which 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.