Review

Art

Culture

Ethics

War & peace

4 November 2025

5 min read

Can we stop killing each other?

How art, theology, and moral imagination confront our oldest instinct

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A 17th Century painting of Moses and the brazen cross.

Luca Giordano, The Brazen Serpent, c.1690, oil on canvas.

Compton Verney, photography by Jamie Woodley.

What more important question can there be for humanity, Jago Cooper, Executive Director of the Sainsbury Centre, asks than ‘Can we stop killing each other?’ The Sainsbury Centre’s radical exhibition programme explores the big issues in contemporary society (see my article ‘Life Is more important than art’) so has rapidly arrived at the point where it is exploring what has wrong with the world when killing occurs and how can we put it right.

Cooper sets out the ground that this series of exhibitions seeks to cover: ‘From interpersonal violence to state level conflict, killing has spread its devastating impact throughout all human cultures across the centuries. Why does this violence occur? And can it be better prevented at a time when increased societal pressures of population growth, resource scarcity, human migration and rapid environmental change make the risk of conflict higher? Every day we read about horrifying acts playing out locally and internationally, but what is the answer to stopping them?’

Can we stop killing each other? includes an installation by Aotearoa/New Zealand artist Anton Forde, a series of new paintings reflecting on the refugee crisis by Ethiopian artist Tesfaye Urgessa; presentations of historical artworks such as Claude Monet’s ‘The Petit Bras of the Seine at Argenteuil’, and an exhibition spanning Shakespearean tragedy to Hitchcockian spectacle, which asks questions of violent stage and screen narratives, plus (from November) ‘Seeds of Hate and Hope’ highlighting personal artistic responses to global atrocities, such as genocides, ethnic cleansing, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

It starts, however, with a room displaying Biblically themed explorations of this question. ‘Denunciation of Cain’ by G.F. Watts depicts the after-effects of the first murder with Watts viewing Cain as a symbol of ‘reckless, selfish humanity’. A pair of paintings by Luca Giordano then take us deeper into the ambiguities of our human responses to anger and violence. ‘The Brazen Serpent’, tells the story of the Israelites’ journey from Mount Sinai in Egypt to the Promised Land of Canaan. On this journey, a plague of poisonous serpents punishes the Israelites for their disobedience and lack of faith. Moses is instructed by God to make a bronze, or ‘brazen’, serpent that will heal those that repent. The curators ask, ‘Does this portrayal of killing as a punishment set a cultural precedent, or establish a moral code for right and wrong?’ Alongside is ‘The Judgement of Solomon’ in which two women both claim to be the mother of a living child and where the true mother is revealed by means of an order that the child to be cut in half with a sword and shared. The true mother reveals herself as the one who will give the baby away to protect the child’s life. Here, the threat of violence is used to bring about justice.

William Hogarth’s print series The Four Stages of Cruelty, with verses by Reverend James Townley, reveals how violence escalates and shows how a lack of moral supervision can lead to a life of crime. Finally, Matt Collishaw’s series of thirteen photographic works entitled ’Last Meal on Death Row, Texas’ alludes to the number of apostles at the Last Supper while depicting the last meals chosen by condemned prisoners on death row in the state of Texas, United States.

The curators suggest that: ‘The artworks in this gallery, and beyond, suggest that there is a choice between peace and conflict and that moral stories exist to guide us towards making ethical decisions in real life. Art provides a powerful connection through which to experience life at its most chaotic and incomprehensible, enabling us to pause and reflect on the darkest aspects of human existence. It can also create vital opportunities for society to mourn and remember victims of violence, and to come together in acts of healing and repair.’

These images and the Bible stories on which they are based give us more than simple moral guidance, however. They also provide an explanation for the existence of conflict between human beings and reveal God’s subversion of that ingrained human tendency.

In the story of Cain and Abel, Cain is jealous of Abel and kills him as a result. The anthropologist René Girard suggests that this story reveals the way in which we consistently act as human beings. We desire something that is possessed by someone else and become disturbed through our longing for what we don’t have. We resolve our disturbance by creating a scapegoat of the person or people who appear to have or prevent us from having what it is we desire. When the scapegoat is killed, we can gain what we desire and also release the sense of disturbance that we feel.

This scapegoat mechanism becomes expressed in religions involving human sacrifices as scapegoats to appease their gods. In the story told within the pages of scripture, it is out of such religions that Abraham is called to form a people who do not sacrifice other human beings, but instead use animals as their scapegoats and sacrifices. Jesus is later born into this people who have subverted the existing practice of scapegoating and he further subverts this practice because, as he is crucified, God becomes the scapegoat that is killed. Once God’s Son has become the scapegoat, for those who follow him, the scapegoat mechanism is undermined and the scapegoating of others should no longer be possible.

In ‘The Judgement of Solomon’, the threat of violence is used to reveal the desire of the woman who had taken the mother’s child and the self-sacrifice of the true mother. On the cross, the violence meted out to Jesus reveals the full horror of the scapegoating mechanism in the torture and violent death of the wholly innocent one.

Jesus explicitly equated his crucifixion with the raising up of the bronze serpent that brought healing because in that story, when it is raised, as Jesus also was, the image of the source of the poison in the lives of human beings became the source of healing. That is also the promise that Christianity holds out to us in relation to the effect of Jesus’ crucifixion where he becomes sin for us. It heals us of our absolute need to scapegoat and harm others.

Can We Stop Killing Each Other? Sainsbury Centre:

Tiaki Ora ∞ Protecting Life: Anton Forde, 2 August 2025 – 19 April 2026

Eyewitness, 20 September 2025 – 15 February 2026

Roots of Resilience: Tesfaye Urgessa, 20 September 2025 – 15 February 2026

The National Gallery Masterpiece Tour: Reflections on Peace, 20 September 2025 – 11 January 2026

Seeds of Hate and Hope, 28 November 2025 – 17 May 2026

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Article

Art

Culture

13 August 2025

5 min read

Emily Young: the sculptor listening as the still stones speak

Unlocking the stillness, from underwater sculpture to St Paul's Cathedral

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A sculptor works on a carved face emerging from a stone larger than her

Young creating.

Emilyyoung.com

As a painter, Emily Young says she worked relatively quickly in her distinctive surreal style featuring penguins and figures with penguin heads. When she came to sculpture in the 1980s, what she most appreciated was the resistance she felt as she worked, meaning that she ‘had to slow down’ and ‘be super careful’. Right from her first works as a sculptor, the stone was speaking to her, teaching her the value of stillness.

The stones with which she works still speak to her. The stone ‘tells me what it is willing to do’ and ‘lets me know exactly what it can and cannot do, and I work with that’. ‘The stone’, she says, ‘leads me through into this zone where we’re working together’. Ultimately, she says, ‘what I’m showing is that the relationship between a human and the planet can be very, very respectful, and very, very beautiful’. In this way, she uses the beauty, history, and energy of stone to connect people to the natural world.

Her respect for the stones is, in part, because she moves ‘through layers of history in the stones’. Because of their age, stones bring ‘messages to us from a time before culture’; ‘nature has been making stones’ for millions of years meaning that ‘they are from deep time’. This is the ‘stillness of stone compared to me as a short-lived human being’. Her work, therefore, involves ‘throwing something out there that is more enduring than soft humans’.

Her most recent exhibition was entitled ‘Comparative Stillness’. This title was chosen because the way the faces and the bodies she carves ‘always come out, there’s peacefulness there, there’s stillness’. ‘If you sit in this stillness of the stone’, she says, ‘you can find a great joy and a great peace’. She has asked herself, ‘What is it that I’m doing when I’m carving a human head out of stone?’ Her answer is that she is ‘finding an essential core of being alive that has in it, stillness’. ‘It’s the stillness that I’m after’, she says, and ‘out of that stillness come good actions.’ As a result, she says, ‘what I’m completely dedicated to now is to show that we do have access to that stillness and it could be our saving grace’. Everyone, she thinks, ‘should have quiet, kind symbols of internality around them’.

Describing her symbols, she says that: her discs are translucent, holding light within while symbolising the wholeness of the universe; her heads are never of particular people and are embodied consciousnesses with a sweetness to their closed eyes; and her torsos show the beauty and vulnerability of the female form which holds the capacity to create life.

The ‘quietness inherent in stone can also found in our consciousnesses’, which is why she speaks of her stone heads as ‘embodied consciousnesses’. She thinks that religion leads towards this same stillness and, therefore, thinks her art is doing a similar job to that which religion does, ‘trying to give value to people’s lives, what you can and can’t do’. Christ, she says, ‘is a particularly fine example of a teacher’. Her works ‘seem at home within the quietness of churches’ because ‘churches are places that have something of time, deep time’. She has made many sculptures for ecclesiastical settings, including St Paul’s Churchyard and Salisbury Cathedral, while exhibitions of her work have been held at St James Piccadilly and St Pancras New Church.

When I met her, she was in London for the McDonald Agape Lecture in Theology and the Visual Arts 2025. ‘Theology and the Visual Arts: Firming Foundations; Firing Imaginations’ is a five-year project to strengthen the foundations of Theology and the Visual Arts as a discipline within academic Theology, and help to shape its future. The project’s work is showcased to a public audience through major public lectures in an internationally renowned arts venue.

This year’s lecture put Young in dialogue with US painter, Genesis Tramaine, an expressionist devotional painter deeply inspired by biblical texts. Like Young, Tramaine also creates monumental heads, and both speak of being led as they create their works; Young, by the stories in the stones, and Tramaine, by the Holy Spirit following prayer, worship and study of scripture. By being led in their work, both essentially agreed that, as Tramaine put it, you can't be present when creating, instead you ‘have to trust yourself to the process, surrender, and play in the space’. Whether creating the heads of angels or of saints, both are depicting ‘messengers from heaven’.

The good actions that have arisen out of stillness for Young include a project to re-diversify the Maremma seabed in Casa dei Pesci. The seabed in this area, as also in many other places, is being destroyed through illegal fishing by dredger trawlers which destroy the seagrass meadows that are the breeding grounds for marine life. A local fisherman Paolo Fanciulli decided to address the problem by asking artists, including Young, to sculpt huge blocks of Carrara marble as, once these lie on the seabed, they make it impossible for the dredger trawlers to operate in the area. 29 sculptures, including four Stone Guardians by Young, form the Talamone Underwater Museum, which has seen ‘the trawlers go away’ and ‘the seabed diversify’ once again.

Young also creates large sculptures in the grounds of Convento di Santa Croce, the ruined monastery in Tuscany where she now lives. She says she has ‘been quiet’ and ‘become reclusive’ living there because the place itself is ‘really peaceful and quiet’ with a ‘handmade stillness to everything’. When the rains come, ‘bits of the steep hills fall away’ revealing ancient stones formed of volcanic materials, while caves which had fallen in on themselves have filled up with rainwater creating over time ‘a layered geology’. In this way in this area, ‘the earth is giving great stones to work with’.

In this delightful, giving place of stillness, she can sit quietly, prayerfully. She notes ‘how difficult it is to find a place of stillness today because of the ‘cacophony of distraction’ we all experience. Her aim is to show the way we are ‘wasting the gift of life’ and to reveal ‘our one consciousness’ in the stillness of stone.

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