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Welcome to the web-home of sculptor and liturgical artist Ali Hutchison

Working with camera, charcoal, paint, stone, clay, bronze

About

Ali Hutchison’s art practice embraces photography, painting and sculpture.  Always a devotee of aesthetic beauty she has revelled in the chance to embrace making artworks as an expression of creativity after a freelance career creating with words, both written and broadcast.

Faith and Church Work Artist Statement

Birthing new creation usually demands hard labour.  In Hutchison’s practice the studio becomes a prayer cell, a reverential place of prostrate adoration, whispered intimacies.  Yet it is also a painful struggle, to align faith’s paradoxes against the contexts of a broken world and confusing, contemporary church.  Working primarily in ecclesiastical settings, this artist-pilgrim seeks always to portray truth, not sugar coatings; and in body, mind and spirit thus invests emotionally and spiritually in the mark-making, whether on canvas, chiselled in stone or expressed in lost-wax bronze casts!

Describing herself as a liturgical artist and sculptor, Ali Hutchison aims to create works with embodied presence, which might excite spiritual as well as aesthetic response.  These installations by a fellow wayfarer are sometimes accompanied by accessible wise words.  They cause us to think again, re-examine ourselves, our reactions, our relationships, both earthly and divine.  And they invite us to draw near and receive – through touch, or thought, or just from abiding a while

Eternal Trinity Bronzes 2017

Three triangular-cross-section mobiuses, each an infinity loop with just one plane and one endless edge; representing the Holy Trinity, truly three-in-one.  Created in collaboration with Scartworks Bronze Foundry in Ormskirk, Lancs, each of the bronzes in the Eternal Trinity installation is a one-off, unique in both colour, support and even the angle of mounting.  First exhibited at the Tatton Park Flower Show in 2017 they were endorsed by Bishop Libby Lane who explained their theology to visitors at the RHS show.

From left to right below:

Endless Praise (left below) is supported by carved brown oak.  It is held securely in the ground by spikes which can be unscrewed to allow this piece to be used indoors.  Left outside the oak will eventually mellow to a washed-out silver unless it is regularly oiled.  Bishop Libby Lane said of this piece, ‘It speaks of the human response to the Holy Trinity, in the sense that endless praise is our response to God’s love to us’.  (Still available for sale: please enquire)

Everlasting Love (centre) is mounted on a bough from an ancient ash tree.  The piece is held securely in the crook of the bough, cradled safely yet not overwhelmed, barely aware itself of the strong arm beneath it

La Danse Eternelle (right) is supported by a standing stone.  Bishop Libby remarked, ‘These sculptures are a delight to look at, and to feel; they draw us into a conversation with themselves and their forms, and that, for me, says something about how God draws us into a relationship with him; a continuous, never-ending exploration of who God is and God’s relationship with us’.

The Jesus Doors Easter Stations 2017