Angels in the wind
The artist who designed for the church of miracles
When a local artist is asked to create an art installation for a multi million pound project abroad, it’s an honour. But when the project is for one of the biggest Catholic churches in the world, pride in having been chosen is balanced by more than a little fear.
Maria Loizidou is a Cypriot artist who was selected from hundreds of other hopefuls to design a work of enormous proportions to impress thousands of faithful pilgrims waiting in anticipation for a grand new church to be built in Fatima, Portugal.
Plans for the new Church of the Holy Trinity at the shrine of Fatima, 110km outside Lisbon, began ten years ago. Designed by Alexandros Tombazis, one of the most prominent architects in Greece, the church had to be on a grand enough scale to accommodate the millions of pilgrims that visit the area each year.
For decades local church officials had complained that the existing basilica was far too small to accommodate all the visitors at one of the world’s most popular centres of pilgrimage
Regarded as the holiest site in Portugal and one of the most celebrated sites of Roman Catholicism globally, Fatima was where the parents of Madeleine McCann made a pilgrimage to pray for a miracle in the search for their missing four year old.
Its importance dates back to 1917 when three children in the town of Fatima claimed that a vision of a white angel, believed to be the Virgin Mary, appeared before them. The area remains one of the handful of places where Catholic tradition has it that the Virgin Mary has staged supernatural apparitions in modern times.
As construction plans begun for a church to house 9,000 people, so did a search for 30 international artists who would each design a unique contemporary work of art to decorate the building. Maria was one of the lucky artists chosen to leave her mark on this very special place.
Maria opened her first workshop in Nicosia back in 1987, and explains that times have drastically changed since she first started out as an artist.
“Since joining the EU, Cypriot artists can spread their wings abroad. Now, everything is possible,” she says. “It was of course very important for me to do this project on a personal level, but it’s also significant for Cyprus as a whole. The more local artists leave their mark on contemporary projects in other countries, the more respected our island will become in this field.”
It was decided by the judging panel that Maria was to create a design that would grace the entrance of the church – an outdoor area of vast proportions that would greet all crowds who were to visit this place of worship. “We were given no restrictions as to what we could do,” Maria says, “but we were given certain religious phrases that we had to find a way to somehow include in the work.”
As Maria racked her brains to decide what to create, there were a number of things that proved to be a bit problematic. “What was the best material to use that would withstand wind and rain? And how could I create something that was big enough to fill the huge space, but light enough to design in Cyprus and send over to Portugal? These were the things that really worried me at first,” Maria says.
“I started to draw inspiration from artists who have worked with churches in the past, especially El Greco. A lot of research took place in Paris with the help of specialists who work in the field.”
The first year of the project was the hardest. Maria eventually decided to work with a special hand-woven material made of rust-proof steel wiring. From a distance, the thin mesh pieces were designed to look like large pieces of cloth that flutter in the wind. The point was to let sunlight through, enabling the crowds to pass underneath the installations.
Bronze angels were woven onto the surface of the material and were accompanied by the Latin phrase, ‘Venite Adoremus Dominium’, or ‘Come and bless the House of God’. Covering a width of 25 metres, shadows of angels reflect on the nearby walls as the sunlight passes through the work. As the sun moves throughout the day, so do the positions of the angels.
“My biggest concern was to create a contemporary work of art that would actually fit in with the whole building. After all, modern art and religious buildings don’t often go hand in hand,” says Maria. She explains that a major point of such contemporary designs was to attract youngsters to visit this holy place.
With seven different people working on the design for many hours a day, it took nine months to complete.
“I would keep travelling back and forth from Portugal while friends and family would find it hard to understand why it was taking so long to finish. But it had to be perfect. The whole church project cost 60 million euros and I certainly couldn’t disappoint,” says Maria.
The expectations of pilgrims were met. The new building includes five chapels, nearly fifty confessional booths and a caf? for worshippers to ‘rest and reflect’. The inauguration ceremony of the new church of Fatima took place on October 12, with a Holy Mass attended by 38 groups of pilgrims from 15 countries and thousands of parishioners. In total, an outstanding 700, 000 people went to the inauguration ceremony, many of them in wheelchairs, some even in ambulances all praying for miracle cures for their afflictions.
As the thousands of pilgrims made their way towards the impressive building, not all could fit inside the church and the surrounding area filled with crowds who watched the ceremony on large screens placed outside.
“It was a very special day,” says Maria, “not only for me, but for everyone who was given the chance to be part of such a special project.”
