Back in 2009 I was heading up a monthly service/event for people who wanted to celebrate, explore or express their faith (Christian) in ways that weren’t easily accommodated in a normal Sunday service. This basically meant a bit more time to reflect and meditate, and use of more artistic and multi-sensory material, as well as more interaction. It so happened that one of the evenings fell in Holy Week. A good friend had mentioned a long time previously that she’d had an idea for a sequence of images around elements of the Easter story.We plotted, and she got cracking on turning her ‘mental inbox’ into reality.

Meanwhile my original conception was to find a mixture of alternative narratives and poems to accompany each piece, so I set off on a trawl for work that would fit. To my annoyance, despite a lot of reading and searching, I struggled to find anything that felt right for the event and the mood.

Running out of time, and with some rough descriptive outlines of the pieces to work from, I sat down for a couple of evenings and started to churn out some words. At that point they were all going to be off-centre first-person visualisations; something to cast the familiar in a different light. Inspiration ran dry quite quickly, however, leading to the final production being a mix of prose and poetry, with just one piece from outside sources (and once again, many thanks to Martyn Joseph for permission to use the lyrics to Strange Way when we collected it up into a small book – sorry about the price, that’s Blurb, not us!).

Now seems like an apposite time of year to bring these back in from the cold, so here you go …

Palm Sunday	The Temple	Last Supper
Gethsemane	Cock Crow	Pilate
Crucifixion	Dice	Resurrection

I heartily recommend clicking on the images embedded in the linked pages to get a larger version of the picture; there are a number of details that are otherwise missed, not least the cross, nails, and crown of thorns present and developing in each picture throughout the sequence.