Churchwarden Andrew Sillett writes:
For years, the Lady Chapel at St Giles’ has been defined by Roger Wagner’s 1993 Menorah, a haunting oil-on-canvas painting the Ashmolean purchased to live here on long-term loan (at the time, the largest modern painting ever purchased by the Ashmolean). In the spring of 2010, the PCC voted unanimously on the motion of Hugo Brunner and Catherine Barrington-Ward to make the south wall of the Lady Chapel its home. Since that time, the picture hung as a constant companion to daily reflection, evening prayer, and weekday visits. The former Bishop of Oxford, Richard Harries, took a particular interest in the painting’s presence at St Giles’ and later nominated Menorah for Art+Christianity’s national Ecclesiart listings of notable modern works in UK churches.
Roger Wagner first noticed Didcot from the Oxford–Paddington line, sketchbook in hand: the belching smoke struck him as resembling a crematorium more than it did a sign of God’s presence, though the abrupt, cathedral‑like sky and the monumental bulk of the towers suggested a stage for sacred drama. Part of why those towers made such an impression is that their composition was itself carefully designed: architect Frederick Gibberd set six cooling towers as two widely spaced groups of three, with the massing refined under the Royal Fine Art Commission (with Henry Moore advising) so the station would sit more sensitively in the landscape. Seen from a particular angle, those twin trios and the central chimney align like the seven‑branched menorah, a realisation that became Wagner’s key to placing the Crucifixion in front of them. In Menorah, images of judgement and lament are held together with a glimmer of hope, bringing the ancient and the modern into deliberate conversation.
That conversation sits squarely within Wagner’s artistic convictions. In a recent interview with The Spectator, he stated that he dislikes the pigeon-hole “religious art,” arguing that all serious art seeks meaning; what matters is not novelty alone but a vision “deep and profound.” His work stands in the English visionary line, from Blake to Palmer to Stanley Spencer, where the transcendent is set amid the everyday. Even when he paints the ‘ugliness’ of contemporary industry, he looks for beauty as truth rather than escapism, a way of seeing creation redeemed. Art+Christianity’s Ecclesiart entry likewise reads Menorah as holding together searing judgement and stubborn hope, the light that exposes also promises, framed by Lord Harries’ brief theological reflection on suffering and the Cross.
In 2010, as church patronage of contemporary art was enjoying a fresh wave of attention, the Wallspace exhibition Commission and the book Contemporary Art in British Churches helped set that story in context—placing works like Wagner’s alongside major commissions by leading artists.
On Friday 30 January, Menorah was carefully removed from St Giles’. It has found a new home at The Auckland Project’s Faith Museum in Bishop Auckland, which opened to the public in October 2023 and explores 6,000 years of belief in Britain, telling the story through more than 250 objects drawn from around 50 lenders, alongside contemporary commissions. The museum sits within Auckland Castle’s historic Scotland Wing with a calm, purpose-built extension by Niall McLaughlin Architects; current highlights include Mat Collishaw’s large-scale installation Eidolon. Among the early highlights is the 13th-century “Bodleian Bowl“, a rare Anglo-Jewish bronze with a Hebrew inscription from Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, shown by the Faith Museum as part of its opening displays. Wagner’s painting joins this wider context, and a growing presence for his work at Bishop Auckland, so that many more visitors can encounter Menorah among stories of faith old and new. For visiting information, see the Faith Museum page at The Auckland Project: