Missionary Icon-Scapes of the British Isles: Aidan Hart and the Hermitage of Saints Anthony and Cuthbert

The chapter investigates the development of Orthodox Christian iconography in the United Kingdom during the last 100 years. Focus will be given on the contribution of Aidan Hart in the gradual maturing of icon painting in the country through a series of interviews with him and fieldwork at different sites of his work (both workshops and worshipping places). Emphasis is on The Monastery of St Antony and St Cuthbert, founded, partially built and iconographed by Hart. Crafting application of iconography in spaces made and lived by the iconographer will be compared with his published work as well as positioned in the gradually developing network of local iconographers. Placed in its wider academic and creative practice context icon-painting is examined here as an act of worship through crafting visual-and-spatial dialogues with the viewer on the basis of a personal interaction between the individual (icon painter and viewer) and the person(s) depicted on the material surfaces. Appreciating the transfigurational qualities of iconicity and its relationship with space and time through processes of emplacement, Hart has set a sense of stability in the development of the examined craft in the United Kingdom. Being interlinked with Orthodox traditions, his work is also well integrated to the local topos, arguing for a glocal (global & local) understanding of faith that goes beyond ethnical borders and has the ability to settle; that is about routes and roots at the same time. Distant from any neo-platonic misunderstandings of Orthodox liturgical life, the studied work testifies to a dynamic merging of body and soul, forms and ideas, through the agency of the humans. Emphasis is on the way icon-painting (re)constitutes space: the space of the mind and body, the space of the object itself, the space in which it is placed and worshiped (either a home or a Church). Drawing connections between the sporadic icon-painting efforts of individuals coming from different backgrounds (Russian Orthodox, Greek Orthodox, Non-Orthodox) and the organic backbone that has emerged from Aidan Hart’s school of making and thought, the aim of this presentation is to map the lines of the icon-scape of the British Isles in order to unfold the inherent missionary dynamics of Orthodox culture.