Artist Anne Grebby relishes Chichester Cathedral residency

Anne, who lives in Horsham, will be in the historic building until April 1, and already visitors are enjoying the chance to see Anne at work and on occasion speak to her directly about her creative practice: “This opportunity to be artist in residence at Chichester Cathedral is an exciting way of communicating through painting,” she says, “of entering the biblical narrative and exploring its meanings alongside the public.”

Anne sees her work as a “spiritual thought-generator”: “Painting is a way of harnessing and expressing things which are seemingly insignificant but full of meaningful implications. It can bring to the surface realities which we may sense are there but often ignore or miss. In other words, painting is a way of seeing and communicating both the seen and the unseen.”

For Anne, the attraction of working in the cathedral is that the location physically puts her in the context of her work: “I made the proposal to the cathedral. I had had an exhibition at Canterbury Cathedral at Easter last year and I've worked in various churches over the years, dipping into sacred spaces. Having come from that Canterbury experience it was extremely interesting in terms of the responses that I was getting from the general public. That show was really the Stations of the Cross, dealing with the interactions between Christ and the people he met on the way to his death, and the conversations that it prompted were so stimulating.”

Anne now knows that she has to build the scope for those responses into her time in Chichester: “It is a fairly short period of time that I'm there and I'm making a very large painting.

"The central panel is 200 by 150 centimetres so I've been working on it at home for the past four months so that I didn't just go into it with three blank canvases in front of me and visitors all around!

"My usual working is very hermetic. I work on my own and sometimes nobody sees the work but I've had sufficient exhibitions and shows in public to know that being in public raises some really interesting questions and what you really want is for the people to be receptive.

“I will be working in the Chapel of St John the Baptist (in the east of the Cathedral) so my work is absolutely grounded in terms of context. And there is enormous space.

"My own studio does not have such high ceilings and such room to move physically but it's also a great sense of trying to communicate something more than the narrative.

"One gets trapped into the narrative when one is in seclusion. Sometimes you are entrapped within a meaning but what is happening now is the whole thing becomes so much more physical and the paint itself takes on a different life.”