TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCES and new materials present new opportunities and challenges for church artists. Norma Weller is an artist who has made her own a particular technique for intensifying light and colour which she uses to create powerfully religious images.

Norma Weller is herself a committed Christian, whose encounter with the Turin Shroud was. she says. one of the greatest experiences of her life. At the time. she was interested in techniques of intensifying colour (she lectures in colour studies at the University of Brighton) to create a three-dimensional image. Since then she has developed a technique of using prismatics to bring coloured images alive in an original way by giving them a sense of depth and sparkle.

Her works consist of religious images painted onto glass or perspex surfaces. which are then very brightly illuminated in front of a variegated reflective background. The effect is to intensify the colour and give the relatively plain imagery a dazzling intensity. She believes that the effect is a "transubstantiation" of her subjects into images of depth and spirituality which are, in a sense, reminiscent of the effect of the Turin shroud but in colour. Her works have titles such as Stella Maris, Melchizedek, God the Son, the Last Supper.

Her work has been shown at Winchester Cathedral, where it was well received.
As it requires an ambience where the incidental lighting can be completely controlled it would not suit every church building.
However, Weller is very concerned to place her images wherever they can be of use to the church, whether as a temporary exhibition or as a permanent fixture.

Charles Pickstone is vicar of St Lawrence, Catford in London and a writer on art in The Month and other publications.

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