Make your public shrine or icon corner with www.waysideshrines.com

Following on from recent articles encouraging people to think about creating ceramic icon corners that can be beautiful and discreet, yet clearly visible signs of faith, here, and here, here is someone who can create such images and also carve beautiful shrines in wood or stone to house them in. It is Jerome Quigley of www.waysideshrines.org.

I met him at an Art and Faith event at St Pius X Catholic Church in Rock Island, Illinois this past week. He explained to me that he creates the carvings himself in wood or an artificial granite (used for heavy kitchen surfaces and which can be carved like wood). He can respond to commission and even more interestingly, he has a process whereby he can set images into porcelain. This is not a print, but rather one in which the pigment is set directly into the chemical structure of the substrate porcelain - similar to the way in which pigment is incorporated into the plaster in frescoes.

The tradition of reproducing paintings on porcelain goes back to the 19th century at least. I have recently seen several handpainted porcelain copies of the highest quality made in that time. The look of these hand-painted antique reproductions is the same those that Jerome makes. Here is a 19th-century example. Porcelain has a luminosity to it that you can see in this photograph.

I spoke to him about the possibility of creating icon corners consisting of three images and he was confident that he could produce something beautiful, either on a shrine or as a ceramic piece that could be set in a building by the purchaser, for example. It would need demand from customers for this to happen, but if the business logic is there for Jerome to do it, I am happy to work with him to help create outdoor icon corners.

Here are some more examples of his work. Once again his website is www.waysideshrines.org.

Here