Kate Richards

Blood Tears Faith Doubt is a very small show that asks some very big questions. The themes addressed within the walls of these three small rooms are eternal, divisive and incredibly complex.

Fortunately however the student curators have not attempted to resolve them. They have not attempted to answer such questions, instead allowing the natural and remarkable relationships between the featured works to speak for themselves.

The three rooms in which the work is hung are tiny. Dim lighting and dark painted walls add a solemn, even sobering feel to the space. It is not, for me, unlike entering a church in the middle of the day. A sudden change in light, shadow and temperature plunge you immediately into an acute awareness of yourself and the space around you.

Here and there, as well, bloodlike 'seepages'- Adam Chodzko's Secretors- high on the walls add a distinctly troubling sense that something or someone unknown is in action beyond what we can see.

This is appropriate though as it seems, though the works included are stunningly accomplished examples of their respective media, that it is not the work itself but the process, the practice, the representation of these themes through art that is the focus of the exhibition. Surely, one might suggest, continuing use of religious imagery in art is in itself an expression as well as an exploration of faith.

Here we see public demonstrations of at times, it seems, intensely personal struggles with faith or doubt or all the rest. Christ Crowned with Thorns, for example, is intended specifically to engage an audience, inviting empathy or at least contemplation.

The artist achieves their objective, no doubt, but no more so than Siobhan Hapaska's Saint Christopher who sits, excluded by the church and yet, even in his exclusion, his calm expression suggests he waits only to be remembered, to be awakened. Or, perhaps, to awaken something in us. For me, this simple and beautiful mediation on faith is the most powerful in evidence.

It is particularly poignant when considered in relation to that most famous of sceptics, Doubting Thomas. His existence, despite his actions, is apparently without doubt, and a reminder of the moment at which he is forced to confront the injured Jesus reinforces, I think, the intensity of the relationship between personal, internal faith and the challenges one faces in expressing or reconciling such beliefs in an often hostile environment.

Go and look around these three small rooms; go to see what faith and doubt might mean to you. Chances are even considering, and perhaps as a result of, the religious imagery through which these themes remain consistently and perhaps most clearly expressed, you will see something that renders them universal and eternal, whatever you believe you believe.