Art installation

The Diocese team support over 150 church schools throughout Winchester and Portsmouth Diocese and every year our annual project inspires children, both in our schools and wider diocese. This year we had the TriWonder Project, where the children looked at animals across air, sea and land. The idea of the project was to really focus in on God’s creation, so the children, whether in rural schools or in middle of a city, could look at nature in focus. So it might even have been the weed coming through the crack in the concrete or the spider running up the window. They looked in intense detail at how magnificent God’s creation can be.

It’s mesmerising. The creatures all have individual personalities. It was fun to write a prayer and know it will be up here for all to see. It was good to learn about the world as part of TriWonder and the sea, air and land and there is wonder in our world.

God made the world, and he put a lot of effort in and sometimes people don’t respect the world and treat it as they should. It felt good to see all our creatures and all our prayers hanging in the Cathedral.

We really did think about what to write on our prayers. I wrote about the creatures of the world and asked God to help us into and through Year 7.

It’s been so wonderful to have schools from all over the Winchester Diocese, all over Hampshire and East Dorset come to mark the end of their time in primary school, that transition which I think is really important for them. We have also celebrated God’s creation. They’ve all made these amazing creatures and we had them hung up from the ceiling and it’s wonderful just to see all of those and to celebrate and rejoice with them today.

It’s really important, as all of these children are from Church of England schools, that they meet their Bishops and their Archdeacons because we long to be a larger part of their lives and to see what’s happening as they grow. So it’s a real joy and a privilege for us to be involved in that today.

The installation looks absolutely magnificent in Winchester Cathedral and is causing quite a stir. We’ve had a lot of tourists this week from all over the world who have seen it. I spoke to one man who was visiting, as we were putting it up, and he remarked that in one of the oldest parts of the cathedral, we had work from some of the youngest children, and he said how inspirational he’d found it. So, it not only has had a marked effect on the children, but also people who come to visit the cathedral. They see that God is alive in our church schools and that the children are really enjoying praising God in their own way.