Kevin Atherton, Cathedral II

In 2018, Lismore Castle Arts presented a solo exhibition by Irish based artist Kevin Atherton in St. Carthage Hall which opened on October 27th and continued until November 25th, 2018. In recent years Kevin Atherton has become well known for revisiting his previous works. For his installation at St Carthage Hall in Lismore he had chosen to return to a work from 1986 called Cathedral.

Cathedral is a five-metre by three-metre stained glass window suspended at the end of an east-west avenue of trees in the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire. As one of six sculptures that made up the original Forest of Dean Sculpture Trail, Atherton’s stained glass window continues to be very popular with the general public, who during their visits, frequently took photographs of the window and uploaded them on the internet casting luminous images of it across cyberspace.

When represented as a projection on the stone floor at St Carthage Hall, Cathedral playfully became full-circle. The stained glass window, that when outside refers to a cathedral interior, was brought inside in order to connect to the exterior space of the forest. As a means of underscoring this visual link, at Saint Carthage Hall the animated projection slowly traversed the floor throughout the day edging across the space in a similar way to the shadow cast by the window on the floor of the forest.

Atherton has come to regard the shadow of the window that occured in the forest as an elusive way that the stained glass window has found to document itself. Cathedral II in Lismore was a celebration of this fleeting event.