From Chrysostom, Advent-St Nicholas 2012:
On Wednesday 25th July 2012 in the Marie Eugenie room at Heythrop College, by kind collaboration with the Centre for Eastern Christianity, the Society hosted a lecture – “Our Lady of the Wall – the Holy land icon tradition from origins to the future” – by Ian Knowles, founder-Director of the Bethlehem Icon School, which thus received its UK launch.
After 25 years as an iconographer in the United Kingdom (Elias Icons), Ian‘s work took a new turn in 2008 when he restored the damaged wall paintings in the Orthodox church of St. Nicholas‘ Cave at Beir Jaila. This led to a commission for icons at the Shrine Our Lady of the Mount, at Anjara in Jordan; a new sanctuary design for the Sacred Heart Church at Naur near Amman; and saving the wall paintings at Bethlehem University Chapel. His most extraordinary commission is “The Virgin Mother of The Church” icon, written at the bequest of local Arab Christians on the Palestinian side of the Israeli separation wall. Better known as Our Lady of the Wall, it places the Sacred amid the graffiti alongside the people‘s suffering, but in contrast to violence and injustice, in the hope of peace and reconciliation for all. Ian told this remarkable story and also brought news of the Bethlehem Icon School. Newly founded under the aegis of the Melkite Patriarchal Vicar, Archbishop Joseph Zerey in Jerusalem, with the support of Tantur Ecumenical Institute, it will ensure that the indigenous Arab Christian icon tradition, now hanging on by a thread, is preserved in a new generation.
£475 was raised at the lecture for the Friends of the Holy Land fund, to support the BIS. We will post the text of the lecture in 2013.