Our three judging panels report on the abundance of excellence throughout the UK.

Holtam, Nicholas ; Cork, Richard ; Smith, Otto Saumarez 等

The Rt Rev'd Nicholas Holtam, chair of the judging panel for the ACE Award for Art in a Religious Context:

The three Awards tonight are separate but sit well together. They are among the ways in which ACE has recognised and stimulated the relationship between religion in general and Christianity in particular and the arts. A number of us tonight will be remembering with thanksgiving the contribution made by the Rev'd Tom Devonshire-Jones who died earlier this year and who did so much to further this, particularly as a founder of ACE.

I think I was asked to Chair the Panel for the Award for Art in a Religious Context because of my having been the Vicar of St Martin-in-the-Fields through the period of the building's renewal there with its very high quality engagement with contemporary art. Much as I would like the credit for what was achieved, there are too many here this evening, on each of the Panels and in the audience, who know that the success of the St Martin's project was because the church was very well advised.

The same is true for me tonight and I would like to thank my colleagues as Judges--Janet Gough, Joe Hage, Alexander Sturgis and Jane Williams. We have enjoyed our work, partly from shared conversations but especially from visits to see some of the entries and experience some really good art in a religious context.

The entries were high quality but in a way it is disappointing we only had 40 entries because there is so much going on. From my own Diocese of Salisbury we had two excellent entries: Andrew Johnson's new west window from Lady St Mary in Wareham as well as Squidsoup's hugely popular installation at the cathedral as part of an outstanding arts programme in connection with the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta. But there are other projects in the Diocese that I wish had been entered, such as Tom Denny's window in All Saints Middle Woodford and all the tiles for Magna Carta made by Prisoners at Erlestoke Prison. The 40 entries represent only a sample of what is going on but what we have seen has been heartening.

As it happens, it is a very Anglican short list but we were glad to consider some exciting work in other contexts. Immediately after the first meeting of the judges, I visited Christopher Le Brun's beautiful and practical window Wilderness in the LSE.

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Temporary installations and cathedrals gave us some problems. How could we assess what we couldn't go to see or hear? Annie Samuel's The Whispering at St John's Colsterworth was particularly intriguing, exploring the voices left in the building by its visitors. Annie kindly offered to set up her installation specially for us. We decided we had to treat everyone the same: if it's been and gone we looked at the record.

Cathedrals often have access to a scale of resource unavailable to most churches. Nevertheless there is outstanding work being done that sets an exhilarating benchmark for all religious places. We decided to limit the number of cathedrals on the short list and in the process omitted some marvellous work. The one I personally most regret not including is 'Quietus' by Julian Stair in Winchester Cathedral in 2013. It looked simply beautiful.

Quite a lot of what we saw might have expected to make the short list, such as Mark Cazalet's window of St Cedd in Chelmsford Cathedral and Maggie Hambling's Resurrection Spirit in St Dunstan's Mayfield. In Mayfield in particular, the context and the art interplay very successfully.

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But time and again I was reminded of a question asked at St Martin-in-the-Fields by Vivien Lovell from the art consultants Modus Operandi: 'Does it have that slow-burn intensity?' With so much that is polite and well mannered on our short list it is a good question, sometimes answered by the context as well as the art.

We have a marvellous short list: Antonia Hockton's River of Life reredos at St Georges, Great Bromley, Essex added greatly to the way the altar in the side chapel worked. This was just what a parish church should be doing: engaging a local artist who explored the context and made something new that flowed into the altar and on to those who worshipped there, and although it may have seemed a lot to the parish, it was achieved relatively inexpensively.

David Behar Perahia's Invisible Structura project during a Residency at Gloucester Cathedral appeared to engage a community in exploring that marvellous building. The video of it is remarkable. The creative use of candles, movement, almost liturgy, was enchanting as people explored a great cathedral church by creating all sorts of other temporary structures that transformed the space.

John Maddison's Reredos and Altar at Ely Cathedral are superb. The scale and beauty of this work has focused the space so that the eye is drawn to the altar and is no longer distracted by what now seems an eccentric and out of place figure above it. The space is understood so perfectly that we reflected on what must have been a careful collaboration between the artist and his wife who is the cathedral's architect.

Bill Viola's Martyrs at St Paul's Cathedral was/is ambitious in both the subject and the setting of the installation. It takes your eye down the south aisle from under the Dome. We saw photographs of it behind an altar at which the Eucharist was being celebrated. Without that liturgical context I found it harder to read but visitors were attentive and stayed through the whole sequence. Intensely theological it addressed big issues of the day and asked questions of us about meaning, life, death and what we would give our lives for.

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The Enhancements to St Mary's Iffley by Nicholas Mynheer and Roger Wagner have the advantage of what was already a marvellous church with plenty of evidence of predecessors who loved and cared for the place, but my goodness this present generation have done well.

Roger Wagner's windows were made in the studio of Tom Denny. Tom is quoted near the end of Richard Harries' The Image of Christ in Modern Art:

   A lot of the things we are interested in
   are not generally esteemed in the
   contemporary art world ... What we are
   interested in is not being irreverent but
   reverent; not 'referencing things', but
   'being' things.

These church artists are distinctive and their work greatly enhances a building that has been there for a thousand years.

Maciej Urbanek's HS at St Michael's Camden caught our eye. Again, it is by a local artist and inexpensive. The use of photocopied black bin bags is not immediately obvious. It is dramatic, theological and practical in that it covers a large and damaged wall relatively cheaply. Indeed the danger might be that everyone likes it so much that they forget it is intended to be a temporary installation and the wall does need to be repaired.

HS makes a huge impact on the church building as well as on the community around the church. It works on every level. Art transforms a place of worship and renews both the place and people who are the church. It communicates deep and wide in the gift of the Holy Spirit at baptism does. It conveys what cannot be spoken. We thought HS was a clear winner.

Nicholas Holtam is Bishop of Salisbury

Richard Cork, chair of the judging panel for the ACE/Mercers' International Book Award:

I was delighted that the prize-giving event was held in the chapel at King's College London, a recently restored Victorian interior designed by George Gilbert Scott, who also created the Albert Memorial and St Pancras Station. It reminded me of the early epiphany that I experienced when, as a schoolboy in the early 1960s, I first visited Stanley Spencer's memorial chapel at Burghclere. His transformation of the interior with heartfelt paintings of the First World War was a revelation. It made me realise that even an ecclesiastical interior modest in scale could become a setting for ambitious, visionary art.

Plenty of distinguished religious images were discussed and reproduced in the 21 books considered by the judging panel which I chaired for the 2015 ACE/Mercers' Award. Peter Cormack's generously illustrated Arts & Crafts Stained Glass looked at how a progressive group of late 19th-century artists reinvented stained glass in many religious buildings. But Michele Bacci roamed far wider in The Many Faces of Christ: Portraying The Holy In The East And West, 300 to 1300. Christ's image was shaped by a wide variety of ancient and biblical ideas about beauty. Ancient documents portraying Christ also gained authority, shaping images which many believed were true to life.

Through the ages, artists have likewise striven to interpret the Book of Revelation. Carefully selecting examples, Natasha O'Hear and Anthony O'Hear discuss them in Picturing The Apocalypse: The Book of Revelation In The Arts Over Tivo Millennia. The images they choose are often intensely dramatic, and Rosalind Thuillier makes clear in her book on Graham Sutherland: Life, Work and Ideas that he was inspired by the challenge of depicting some of the most harrowing moments in Christ's life.

The stories attached to Saints Dominic and Francis are focused on by the artists in Sanctity Pictured: The Art of the Dominican and Franciscan Orders in Renaissance Italy. Edited by Trinita Kennedy, this multi-authored book shows how members of both these orders erected churches of astonishing monumentality and magnificence all over Italy.

Within the buildings, artists were often deployed to visualise narrative scenes like Saint Francis preaching to the birds, or Saint Dominic magically ensuring that one loaf of bread became immense enough to satisfy the appetites of hungry friars desperate for nourishment. We decided to give third prize to this fascinating book, published with considerable verve by Philip Wilson.

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Our second prize was awarded to Aaron Rosen's Art + Religion in the 21st Century. Agnostics and atheists may well imagine that the author has tackled a minor subject here, but Rosen quickly plunges us into the art of today and makes us realise just how much of it is connected with traditions like Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism. He looks at people, wonder (the sublime, heaven and earthworks), cultural identities (creative differences, conflicting images), ritual (performance rites, structure and loss), and in-dwelling (embodiment, galleries and sanctuaries). The illustrations in this Thames & Hudson publication are lavish, challenging us to respond to them on every page, and Rosen begins his text by declaring: 'When you enter the world of art, you are, like it or not, entering the realm of religion.'

The first prize, by contrast, went to a book which delved impressively into the past. The author is Spike Bucklow, and his book title succinctly conveyed the allure of his text: The Riddle of the Image: The Secret Science of Medieval Art. Handsomely produced by Reaktion, it benefited on every page from the insight and expertise of Bucklow. His professional work as an art restorer and senior research scientist enables him to illuminate 'The Riddle of the Image' wherever we look. Bucklow's expertise means that he can explore the methods and materials used by medieval artists, like the outstandingly accomplished yet anonymous painter who created the Wilton Diptych now preserved in London's National Gallery. This is a book written by an author who helps us to understand such complex works of art more fully, and relish them as well. So the members of the judging panel decided that The Riddle of the Image was indeed an outstanding achievement.

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Richard Cork is an award-winning art critic, historian, broadcaster and exhibition curator

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Otto Saumarez-Smith, on behalf of the judging panel for the ACE/RIBA Award for Religious Architecture:

We were a crack team of five judges deciding between a short-list of six churches. Under the chairmanship of the illustrator and author Matthew Rice were: the architectural writer Gillian Darley; the architect and partner at Fielden Clegg Bradley Studios, Tom Jarman; the Right Reverend Stephen Platten, Rector of St Michael Cornhill and Assistant Bishop of the Diocese of London; and myself, an architectural historian and fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford. The process was intellectually challenging, invigorating and immensely fun, and would have been impossible but for the cheerfulness, the expert logistical expertise and enormous driving stamina of Laura Moffat.

Our first stop, setting out early on a crisp sunny winter day, was to Cuddesdon to see the Bishop Edward King Chapel by Niall McLaughlin Architects. Set in isolation at the centre of the college looking onto the countryside, it is a building of a delicate purity, with extremely gorgeous and considered use of materials. The exterior is a jewel-like elliptical drum sitting in a beautiful location. Entering one finds a space with soaring light-coloured wooden vaulting, everything suffused with natural light. There were wonderful moments: cleverly handled external brickwork in a lovely curving zig-zag, a soaring timber roof and a surprising deep set squinch window giving a view out to the fields beyond. The building is a tour de force, everything done with a depth of luxuriousness and intelligence.

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Our next stop was Tectus Architects' Quaker Centre in Kingston, a building working on a totally different tenor to Cuddesdon. The exterior with its colonnade of attenuated steel fins, and bulbous roof lights was much less monumental than the photographs had suggested, and much more in tune with the quiet suburban street. It was the interior that really charmed us. The main meeting room for worship, with its almost Pantheonic central roof light speaks remarkably of the 'inner light', which is a key phrase for Quakers and which stands central to their understanding of worship. But these qualities were continued throughout, with many spaces top lit by natural light, and everywhere subtly considered and elegant detailing. The centre is self-managing (it does not need a caretaker), and there were a large range of events going on when we visited from a coffee morning to baby yoga. The way the building was able to lend dignity to these humdrum human goings on, and exuded a sense of calm despite them, was one of the things that especially impressed us.

Following a sadly lackluster pub lunch (we stupidly failed to follow the Quakers' advice!) we set off through traffic for Wanstead United Reform Chapel, which has been sensitively restored by Theis and Kahn Architects. The Grade II listed church was originally built in St Pancras in the 1860s, but was transported to Wanstead brick-by-brick when the railway came. Pictures of the church before the restoration showed the extraordinary transformation that had occurred. We were struck by a wonderfully light and orderly space. The interventions were subtle yet imaginative, working with the building's original Gothic Revival architecture to clarify them, and not overwrite the buildings odd history. Attractive details carried on into the pleasant ancillary rooms, and we were especially charmed by an ingenious window blind system.

Our second, rather epic, day of touring started in Edinburgh, with the newly built Chapel of St Albert, by Simpson and Brown for the Edinburgh Dominican Roman Catholic Chaplaincy. This is a church with a real sense of flair and elan about it, with a magnificent flying roof, which appears from many angles to float. The low lying building, which adjoins two town houses, romantically and playfully opens out at the east end into the garden. A subtly tree-like CorTen steel baldacchino allowed for a wonderful merging of the interior and the mature trees beyond, which were thankfully able to remain. Sliding doors allowed for subtle changes to the form of the church and the way it is entered in a way that was full of drama. The materials, including the same stone used in Edinburgh's new town, with a lovely patina, the sedum finished oak-lined timber ceiling, and the surprising grass roof seen from the town houses behind, were all very beautiful.

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Our next stop, after a very scenic drive southwards, was the Hermitage chapel of Shepherd's Law by WHR Pattisson, for Brother Harold Palmer. The building is situated on a hill, simultaneously charmed and blasted, in remote rural Northumberland. The chapel is sui generis, and I think in common with most of the judges I was expecting a historicist oddity. Despite the Romanesque style and the undoubted idiosyncrasies of the project we were unprepared for a building that was both so modest, yet also totally assured, mysterious and moving. On the exterior the building has a wonderful mixture of heavy stone, re-used local stone from demolished buildings, and slim, almost Roman, bricks which had been soaked in the sea at Holy Island--indicative of a project in which every detail is invested with such feeling and care, even love. The interior moves from a dark narthex, through fretted iron gates, into a much lighter space of worship. The whole interior was sustained immensely by the thick and heavy primitive stained glass, both representational and non-representational, with a wonderful use of colour. It is a magical place.

From the remoteness of Northumberland, we arrived at a parish church set in the very heart of its community, in the centre of the former coal mining town of Pontefract: St Giles Church, which has been restored by Walker Cunnington Architects. The church was in a very bad state before this intervention, neither beautiful nor fit for purpose, with medieval stonework covered in layers of gloss paint, and a gallery and west end passageway intruding on the medieval building. The reordering recovers much of the best of the medieval work, and provides space for meeting rooms, which benefits both the community and provides regular revenue. It is a cheerful and alive place now, with the best of the former church recovered.

There was not a church amongst the six that did not have its passionate advocate. Our long and passionate meeting to decide a winner, in which many recondite issues of theology, liturgy and aesthetics were wrestled with, was only resolved on the very walk to the ceremony, and only then with the decision that the prize would be shared between two of our favourites. The experience of both seeing such a diverse range of churches from many different denominations, and having to think deeply about their achievements, was thought provoking and moving. We were especially impressed by the commitment of the communities who use these buildings, often in the face of considerable logistical challenges, who were able to lift spaces above the functional or utilitarian. When faced with such a range of denominations and styles of worship it was sometimes difficult to work out a common set of criteria with which to adjudicate between our shortlist--but I came to feel that there were two rather different ways a church could be successful. First is the way the architectural qualities of the building, of light, space, colour and texture, are affective --or even suggestive of spirituality. They can also be successful less for transcendence and more for the way that it creates spaces that are nurturing of a community. I felt our two winners --Shepherd's Law and the Kingston Quaker Centre--in incredibly different ways exemplified these qualities, but that all of the buildings are worthy of celebration.

Otto Saumarez Smith is Shuffrey Junior Research Fellow at Lincoln College, Oxford