Minster provides gothic setting for contemporary art

We’ll have to wait for the sunny days of 2014 to catch the light streaming through the great stained glass windows, making patterns on the paving and pews, spreading great swathes of colour over the walls and monuments.

But you’d be so wrong. Because for the second year in succession, this great building is going to be the centrepiece of an innovative and revelatory four-day event that will delight visitors and Minster staff alike.

The ancient will meet the very modern for York Minster Nights (part of the Illuminating York Festival) that takes place from October 30 until November 2, and, promises Stephanie O’Gorman, who has been the Events Organiser here for six years now, “it will be eye-opening – memorable and innovative”.

Visitors arriving at the Minster as dusk turns into night are going to get a very rare view of the central Nave – every one of the seats will have been moved, and a vast open space revealed. It will take half a day for a team of vergers to move the furniture (and to put it all back again on November 3) and Stephanie admits that she may “not be, for a while, the most popular person in the Minster team – it will be hard work for all involved, but they and all of us know that it is going to be worth every last second of effort”.

Without the chairs, you’ll see how medieval worshippers saw the place – they either had to stand through services or to kneel, and only the elderly, the very young or the infirm could sit on the stone ledges running around the edges of the interior.

This event will be, in essence, four days of “live art” within the iconic setting of one of the world’s most beautiful buildings. Artists from the Leeds-based art collective Black Rose will be joined by the street artist Inkie (recently named by Time Out magazine as one of their top one hundred creatives) to make many specially-commissioned artworks that use the Minster, its ambience and its architecture, to amaze, delight and to inspire. Four light boxes will be covered in elaborate designs, and a collective of artists will be working on a number of individual pieces. One vast work will be created on huge hoarding boards by the team.

It hasn’t been an easy task for Joy Gilleard, who is an artist and a co-founder of Black Rose, but it is clearly one that she has relished and embraced, and her colleagues have risen to a big challenge.

“It is an immense privilege to get to work on a commission like this”, she says. “We are all of us much more accustomed to working in modern, contemporary and urban settings than in a gothic cathedral, but you could not find a better place to discover all kinds of inspirations for the designs.”

Her fellow event co-ordinator and artist Neil Parkinson observes: “Art is all about trying to find answers and beauty, so whatever the style and age of the artist, whether ancient or modern, we feel that it all part of the same thing”.

Inkie says, quite simply that this commission for him: “Is a dream come true. To paint in the nave of a building like this, using the interior details as an inspiration is quite extraordinary”.

Tickets www.yorkminster.org or 01904 557208.