Objectspace documents the loss of Athfield’s First Church of Christ

Within the early Eighties, Ian Athfield, Ian Dickson, Graeme Boucher and Clare Athfield designed the wondrous, whale-like constructing for the First Church of Christ Scientist in Wellington – the shape conceived to accommodate the church organ – and, on its roof, a staircase that appeared to have been created “for the sheer imagining of its rise”.

The Willis Road web site was offered by the church in 2021 to make method for high-density flats within the metropolis and, in October 2022, the constructing was demolished. Within the months previous the constructing’s demise, efforts had been made first, to save lots of the constructing after which to retrieve artworks commissioned on the time of the church’s design: stained-glass home windows by James Walker, ornate ceramic capitals by Clare Athfield, Darren Matthews and Neville Porteous, and an enormous Doreen Blumhardt tiled wall.

This exhibition at Objectspace brings collectively fragments from the constructing and its loss. Simon Devitt’s images of the demolition provide glimpses of the guts of the church – an octagonal auditorium rendered in pink and creamy whites with amusingly eccentric bent columns, which as soon as flanked a rostrum designed for impact with mirrored ceiling and reflecting pool.

The title of the exhibition references the small fraction of the constructing and its crafted artworks remaining at this time, in addition to the beneficiant 5 per cent price range allotted on the time of design to the contributing artists.

Lower than 5 per cent consists of a listing of the surviving ceramic floral capitals and proof of Doreen Blumhardt’s tiles, saved within the church’s remaining hours. It’s an incomplete file of the constructing’s life and making, of a particular place now not there.

Lower than 5 per cent: Athfield’s First Church of Christ Scientist
18 March – 14 Might 2023
Objectspace