NOTEBOOK SPOTLIGHT: Wing of Life commission
Commissioned by the PCC of All Saints Church, Lydiard Millicent, Swindon, part of the church reordering project with Benjamin & Beauchamp, etched by Leadbitter Glass, 2024-2025. Featuring drawings by pupils at Lydiard Millicent CE Primary School: Cassidy, Pavith, Xanthe, Esme, Teddy-James, Beatrix, Jacob, Quinton, Mia, Kenza, Lily, Alfie, Isla, and Penelope.
Wing of Life is a kaleidoscopic pattern of nature’s details through lettering, curlicues, silhouettes and children’s sketches. It is a celebration of the small kingdoms found in churchyard flora and fauna. Snail, mouse, squirrel and fox are among the ground-dwelling creatures; daisies, dandelions, bluebells and oak leaf fill the flora; while birds such as the blue tit, wren, bat, and crow lift skyward.
In October 2024, I had been invited by Revd Tudor Roberts of All Saints Church Lydiard Millicent to fulfill this commission for an etching onto a single glass door at the entrance to the church. Later that year, I spent a wonderful morning at Lydiard Millicent Primary School leading a drawing workshop with a group of children on the school’s Worship Committee. Having seen previous drawings by children who had responded to various Bible verses, we settled on Psalm 24:1, ‘The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it’. This verse celebrates the abundance of the world, and I began by asking the children to imagine the church building having ‘everything in it’. What should be on the door design if everything in the whole world was inside? The children thought about things outside that they loved, things in their gardens, their pets, and things in the park and countryside.
We then got drawing – using white chalk on (lots of!) large sheets of black paper. As visual aids, I brought along nature guidebooks and printed pictures to show various plants and animals native to All Saints churchyard including garden flowers, British birds, butterflies, tree leaves, grasses, snails, small mammals, and fungi. The children filled two 1.5m x 4m sheets of paper, amounting to over 200 drawings.
I also wanted to incorporate the text in fluid way, something that revealed and concealed itself through the overall patterning of the design, and so I looked to other visual work where emphasis on natural detail is combined with a graphic style, including Klimt’s Tree of Life (1912) and etched glass designs by the contemporary artist Diane Palley. The style I was looking for needed to suit text and visual inversions: the text of Psalm 24:1, readable from both sides of the door, was important, as was the means of describing small things in a large pattern.
Formative here was the church’s South Window by Margaret Edith Rope (1891-1988), where text flows from black to white, and black again, and where myriad details of bird and leaf/flower fill a large area. Her design incorporates text from a BCP Song of Creation, and I hoped that my design in turn would pay tribute to Rope’s Arts and Crafts style as it relates to the liturgy, as well as the English landscape and love of intricate natural detail.
The shape of a butterfly wing, large and ornate, describes the unfurling and blooming of life in all its miraculous abundance. Throughout, curlicues echo the carved timber lintel of the nineteenth-century inner porch, whose Bible verse (John 1:4) proclaims the light-life of Christ: ‘In him was life, and that life was the the light of men’. With its echoes of resurrection symbolism, both doorway and wing represent a threshold towards metamorphosis and transformation.
The completed door was installed in July 2025 and opens onto a bright and spacious remodelled south aisle. With other fabric changes (including pew removal, new floor, heating and lighting, and kitchenette), the beauty and celebration in the door’s verse is intended to reflect the community’s welcome, as part of their Gospel mission to invite all. Including children’s drawings in the final design is a key part of this celebration, with small-scale reflection of a large-scale kingdom.
Header image: Wing of Life, 2025, by Sheona Beaumont.
