The bold museum reflecting a “moonlight” experience of the unseeable

Robert Wright visits the UK's only Faith Museum, in Bishop Auckland, and hears how its funder hopes to inspire reflection on the divine.

Robert Wright

Robert is a journalist at the Financial Times.

A art installaton showing purple and pink flame-like shapes moving in a darkened room

The Eidolon art installation.

It takes a moment to grow accustomed to walking in the dark of the long, steeply roofed room that houses Mat Collishaw’s art installation Eidolon. But the artwork’s impact is immediate. Two huge, moving images in the middle of the room show a blue iris flower. It is being engulfed by flames but not consumed. Speakers play, in Latin, a story from the Hebrew bible’s Book of Daniel in which three young Jewish men survive being thrown into a fiery furnace for refusing to worship the Babylonian king. The artwork is a rare successful attempt to capture in modern art the essence of Christ’s crucifixion and the Christian tradition of martyrdom, with its roots in earlier Jewish beliefs.

Watch Eidolon

Eidolon is one of the highlights of the UK’s first Faith Museum, a bold project opened on October 7 in Bishop Auckland castle, the historic residence of the Bishops of Durham. The museum forms part of The Auckland Project, a series of initiatives in Bishop Auckland, north-west of Darlington, being funded by Jonathan Ruffer, a Christian and successful City investor. Ruffer’s childhood home was outside nearby Middlesbrough. The new institution aims to tell the story of 6,000 years of faith in Great Britain, starting with the Gainford cup and ring stone. The stone, found 90 years ago 10 miles from Bishop Auckland, may date from as early as 4,000BCE. It features carvings regarded as the earliest evidence of religious practice in Great Britain.

Jonathan Ruffer.

A man stands in a formal dining room that has traditional paintings on the walls

Jonathan Ruffer, in Bishop Auckland Castle.

Ruffer, however, declines to link the museum’s contents to his own faith or an explicitly Christian message. He insists that he is merely seeking to advance discussion of faith in a society where it is little debated but remains a potent force. In the living room of Castle Lodge, his home in the castle grounds, Ruffer compares the contemporary taboo about religion with the very different mores of the 19th century.

“Nobody talked about sex in Victorian times,” he says. “It’s impossible to imagine that because the public world was silent on it, it was not as much a guiding force as it is today. I think that’s where faith is now.”

He adds that the 10-year process of establishing the museum has made it “absolutely apparent” to him why there are no other similar institutions.

“What is a museum for?” he asks. “It’s to gawp at things and if you think what is the subject matter of a faith museum, it’s God. In whatever form and shape that you believe that God to be, you cannot see that topic.”

The museum is nevertheless rich in sometimes poignant objects that the curators call “witnesses” of faith. They include the Binchester Ring, a ring with Christian symbols dating from the third century of the Christian era. The ring, found only a mile from the museum, is regarded as the earliest known evidence for Christian practice in Britain. There is a small slate, engraved on one side, that served as an altar for Recusant Roman Catholics while their Church was out in the cold and had to stay hidden during the Reformation years. The slate could be turned over and disguised as a normal roof slate when not in use. The museum has on loan the Bodleian Bowl – a rare example of a ceremonial vessel used by one of England’s Jewish communities before King Edward I expelled the group in 1290.

Ruffer says the impact of the objects – many on loan from other museums - comes from their histories.

“There’s a great power in the objects that we have,” he says.

Eileen Harrop.

A priest stands in front of lead glass windows and carved seats.

Eileen Harrop, entrepreneur priest and museum advisor.

Among the advisers on the museum’s establishment was Eileen Harrop, a Church of England priest originally from Singapore and of Chinese origin. She was appointed an “entrepreneur priest” in 2016 to work with Ruffer on The Auckland Project. Meeting in the castle’s former library, she says the museum avoids suggesting all faiths are the same, while also steering clear of Christian proselytising. Harrop, now the vicar of four parishes around Bishop Auckland, expects the museum to have a powerful effect on visitors.

“It allows for people to experience the God who led Jonathan here,” she says. “It allows for people to enter into all the different ways in which people can identify something about faith and then it’s up to God.”

A visit’s emotional impact comes largely from the new institution’s first floor, devoted to works created by contemporary artists exploring faith. Some of the most powerful exhibits are black-and-white pictures in which Khadija Saye, a young British-Gambian artist, explores possible uses for religious objects belonging to members of her family, some Muslim and some Christian. Saye lost her life in the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire.

A series of works by Christian painter Roger Wagner has proved particularly timely. The museum opened the same day that Hamas terrorists started the current Israel-Gaza war with their attack inside Israel. The paintings translate stories from the Christian New Testament to the contemporary, riot-scarred occupied West Bank.

Eidolon is among the works on the first floor. Harrop calls it an “amazing installation”, particularly for its retelling of the story of Daniel.

“It relates a story… of what was going on in that particular experience of the faithful person called and protected with his companions in relation with God and the power of faith,” she says.

Ruffer, meanwhile, shies away from expressing spiritual aspirations.

Asked how he hopes people will respond to the museum, he says: “I couldn’t care less – that’s up to them. I have many faults but a sense of wanting to tell people or persuade people how they should be is very low down the list.”

Yet Ruffer is clear that he received a clear, divine call to come to Bishop Auckland. He was first drawn to the area by his enthusiasm for Spanish art and his determination to prevent the Church of England’s Church Commissioners, then owners of the castle, from selling its prize artworks – life-size, 17th century portraits by Francisco de Zurbarán known as Jacob and his 12 Sons. The paintings, saved for Bishop Auckland in 2011 by a multi-million-pound donation by Ruffer, remain in the castle. But the Zurbarán link inspired Ruffer to establish a Spanish Gallery, dedicated to art from Spain, on Bishop Auckland’s Market Place.

“I came here really through a calling,” Ruffer says. “I felt the need really to drop everything and come up to somewhere in the north-east, to be part of a community.”

Ruffer’s engagement with the town deepened when the Church Commissioners announced, also in 2011, that they planned to sell the castle. Auckland Castle was formerly a seat of both ecclesiastical and secular power when the Bishops of Durham were prince-bishops – uniquely in England, both secular governors and bishops. The bishops lost the last of their secular powers in 1836. Ruffer bought the castle and transferred ownership to a newly established Auckland Castle Trust, which became The Auckland Project.

“I’ve heard from people who have through it who have said they can’t really put their finger on what it is, but they must go back again,”

Ruffer accepts there are issues with trying to capture the imagination of Bishop Auckland’s 25,000 inhabitants from inside a castle whose imposing entranceway symbolises its symbolic role as a seat of sometimes oppressive power.

“That sense of power is felt as a reality by people,” he says. “But it’s empty. Power has long since moved away from the prince-bishops and then the bishops.”

The castle’s unique history nevertheless makes it the ideal setting for the museum, according to Ruffer. Exhibits are housed both in a wing of the historic castle and a new, purpose-built extension. Ruffer says the castle was a far better place to site a faith museum aimed at raising questions than somewhere more explicitly linked to a specific faith such as a cathedral close.

“Auckland Castle has been intricately involved with faith for nearly 1,000 years and yet it hasn’t been a place of worship,” he says. “It has a chapel but it’s ecclesiastical without being a cathedral, church or minster. So it seemed to me that that made it very appropriate for a faith museum.”

The early signs, according to both Ruffer and Harrop, are that the new institution is encouraging reflection among visitors. Ruffer says the museum has responded to the “elemental need” for faith. He adds that the positive reaction so far vindicates the initiative to establish the museum, which he says has brought together objects and described them “without any directional guidance as to which works”.

Harrop reports that visitors seem to feel the need to experience the museum a second time after a first visit.

“I’ve heard from people who have through it who have said they can’t really put their finger on what it is, but they must go back again,” she says.

Ruffer identifies the museum’s power by saying that it gives people an easier experience of the divine than would otherwise be available to them. He compares the experience of encountering God through the museum to looking at the light of the sun as reflected in soft moonlight. That, he points out, is far easier than looking painfully and directly at the sun.

“The thing that changes people is to be confronted with something bigger than yourself,” he says.

Article

Art

Culture

Film & TV

21 January 2025

5 min read

The constant pull of David Lynch’s direction

What made the director’s films so universally resonant?

Sonny Tindall

Sonny works creatively with videography, graphic design, fashion, and photography.

Lynch painting.

At the age of 16, initially wanting to experience the infamous performances of actors, John Hurt and Anthony Hopkins, I decided to watch The Elephant Man (1980). This was the film that opened up the weird and wonderful world of director, David Lynch, a world I immediately wanted to dive headfirst into.

I did so by watching the film that became the catalyst for world-renowned director and producer, Mel Brooks, offering Lynch the chance to direct The Elephant Man. The film in question? His very first, Eraserhead (1977).

It was, and remains to this day, the most singular cinematic experience of my life.

I’m of the opinion that almost all filmmakers fall in to one of two categories; those who become artists through the medium of filmmaking, and those who are already artists who choose the vehicle of filmmaking to create their art. David Lynch is, for me at least, the ultimate embodiment of the latter. Proof of such can be found in his status as a renaissance man.

Originally a painter, a practice he continued throughout his life, his desire to transition to making films was borne out of wanting to see his paintings move. He was also an actor, a musician, and sound designer. Not to mention, a furniture designer who regularly built props for his films, author of several books and designer of his very own comic book.

The television show, Twin Peaks, is perhaps the best example of just how impossible it was to bind Lynch to a single artistic form. The seminal TV show revolutionised what television could be, as it was the first show to stray from the episodic storytelling format, instead choosing to follow one continual storyline through an entire series.

David Lynch exists within an exclusive category of artists, those whose names have become an adjective. Lynchian, similar to Kafkaesque, Brechtian or Daliesque, is recognised as an official word in the Oxford dictionary. An eponymous adjective is an honour reserved for only the most unique and distinct of artists.

Although it could be argued that the term – Lynchian - is now too loosely applied to anything deemed to be somewhat counter-cultural within mainstream cinema, its true meaning relates to the often indefinable style and voice of the man himself.

He invoked the spiritual depths of us, the existential longings and cravings, the questions that seem intrinsic to the human condition, the wonderings that feel as though they originate from somewhere deep within us, our souls, perhaps.

I’ve come to think that it’s the ultimately the spiritual essence of Lynch’s films that make them truly unique, and him a worthy recipient of an eponymous adjective. Lynch’s films exist within their own world, frequently reminiscent of a dream.

Sometimes euphoric, often a nightmare.

He was an avid practitioner and advocate of transcendental meditation, so it’s perhaps not too surprising that when speaking on his creative process, Lynch attributed many of his creative ideas as emerging from his own subconscious through the practices of meditation and daydreaming. He’s often compared ideas to the act of fishing, they aren’t created, they already exist, you’ve just got to have the right bait to catch them.

I wonder if this process is what makes the worlds housed within Lynch’s films unlike any others. He invites us into his own subconscious, by allowing it to bleed out onto the screen.

Despite his allusivity in style and format, what I’ve always found most confounding about David Lynch’s work is its universality.

I feel as though the term ‘fringe artist’ has scarcely been better applied to anyone other than Lynch.

How has a man who’s created some of the boldest, most avant-garde and, at times, downright disturbing art of the last century picked up four Oscar nominations (and an honorary win), a Masterclass and a Disney movie (The Straight Story)?

Surely translating your own subconscious, something we view as idiomatic to each individual person, onto the screen is a guaranteed recipe for alienating your audience?

So why does Lynch’s work, instead of pushing us away, so consistently pull us in?

I could pontificate on the different potential techniques Lynch employed to keep his work just grounded enough to allow us to relate to it. His films being rooted in instantly recognisable symbols of Americana, for example. Or perhaps his deployment of easily digestible genres and conventions, Twin Peaks is a melodramatic murder mystery TV show, Blue Velvet (1986) and Mulholland Drive (2001) are, at their core, noir films and even Wild at Heart (1990) is a textbook road movie.

But Lynch’s work has taught me to dig far deeper than that.

He invoked spiritual depths of us, the existential longings and cravings, the questions that seem intrinsic to the human condition, the wonderings that feel as though they originate from somewhere deep within us, our souls, perhaps.

That, for me at least, is the answer to his universality.

But how did he do it?

As has already been mentioned, it’s by mining his own subconscious and the spiritual within himself, and allowing it to flow into the worlds he created. But, most importantly, he never definitively characterised these things, he simply let them exist, depicted them. His work doesn’t come to us with the answers, it comes to us with questions. David Lynch’s questions: questions about the world. Questions about himself.

The very same questions we all ask ourselves on a daily basis: is evil within us or is it the product of what is around us? How can we allow light to prevail over darkness?

His work allows us to sit, ruminate, and respond to those questions.

I didn’t anticipate how profound of an effect David Lynch’s passing would have on me. It’s undoubtedly the strongest feeling of loss and grief I’ve felt from the passing of someone in the public sphere.

So deep were my feelings that I felt I needed to process it through the writing of this piece.

And despite the myriad of feelings and thoughts that have been swirling around my head since originally reading the news headline, I find myself continually returning to the very first thought I had. It was a quote from American comedian, Theo Von. When mourning the death of fellow comedian, Norm Macdonald, Theo said,

‘It feels like you’re losing a book that nobody has copies of.’

I feel despair that I’ll never be able to see the world through David Lynch’s eyes again. But I find great comfort that he, through his art, has passed his vision onto us, ensuring that we’ll always be able to see the Lynchian in our world.