The Last Supper, Sion Mills - Our Space 64
As Easter approaches, one looks at one of the most striking pieces of public art in the North West - the huge mural of “The Last Supper” on the front of St Theresa's Catholic Church in Sion Mills, “A long slate sculpture... really an incised drawing, based on the looped and swirling patterns of the Romanesque design”.
A very simple line drawing, white against the massive 4 x 14-metre grey slate. Christ is breaking bread, with a jug of wine beside him on the table. There doesn’t appear to be an actual table - the tablecloth is formed by the men’s robes. 13 men, 11 of them bearded, all designated as holy by their halos except for the man on the far right - Judas Iscariot.
Highly visible, fronting onto the main A5 road through the village, this striking image, and the church’s baptism font, were sculpted by Oisín Kelly for the new church which opened in 1963.
This is Kelly's only work of art in the North West - but he is well known for two sculptures in his native Dublin: ‘The Children of Lir’ in The Garden of Remembrance; and the statue of trade union leader James Larkin in nearby O'Connell Street.
Kelly figures in Seamus Heaney's second ‘Glanmore Sonnet’:
‘These things are not secrets but mysteries',
Oisín Kelly told me years ago
In Belfast, hankering after stone
That connived with the chisel, as if the grain
Remembered what the mallet tapped to know.’
—------
(“The Buildings of Ireland: North West Ulster” by Alistair Rowan: Yale University Press 1979).