Ian Bishop has a somewhat eclectic CV. A multidisciplinary designer, he has created murals of interlocking leaves for a hotel in Cyprus, icing-like floral detailing for the baby-blue-tiled bar at Fortnum & Mason, Islamic-inspired ceilings for a Jordanian palace and Giacometti-inspired lanterns. Elsewhere, he has created a copy of a Jean Arp sculpture for a Tom Ford boutique and a cast stone sphinx for a private client in Ibiza.
Yet the feeling in his own studio is a little more, well, parochial. In 2020 he set up his workshop in the Chapel of Rest, which is located inside West Street Cemetery in Farnham, Surrey. He first moved to the town to do a foundation course after he left school, and later settled permanently there. Living just a few minutes away from the chapel, which had been out of commission since the 1980s, he spotted its potential.
‘I thought it would be the most amazing studio ever,’ Bishop tells me. He started making inquiries about 15 years ago, but the process of converting the chapel has been far from swift. ‘Every five years or so, I would write them another email,’ he recounts. Six years ago, Bishop was finally put up for tender of the property and secured a ten-year lease. ‘I was up against mother-and-baby and yoga groups.’
The restoration of the building was undertaken largely by the council. As it was to be used only as a studio, the interventions were more structural than aesthetic: ‘Fixing the roof and stabilising everything up. A yoga group would have needed to render all the walls,’ Bishop explains. As a result the space has remained much the same, with its chalky-white walls and 19th-century Minton Hollins tiled floor (‘practically indestructible’). ‘It’s always quite dusty, but that’s fine for me,’ he says. ‘I just benched it out and set it up as a workshop.’
A specific historical type of cemetery chapel, the building would have been divided into two sections – a consecrated side, with a nook for the priest (‘this is my kitchen now,’ Bishop says) alongside another half for nondenominational ‘commoners’ who came to pay respects to the deceased for funerals. Half of the site had to be deconsecrated before being turned into a secular building and the council also added a loo. ‘Sometimes I have people knocking on the door, all dressed in black, wondering if they can use the toilet,’ says Bishop.
The building’s large arched doors, which would allow horse-drawn coffins to enter for the ceremony, before driving out again for the dead to be buried, now have a new use in the studio, allowing Bishop to wheel larger pieces in and out. The high, vaulted ceilings are utilitarian as well as contemplative. ‘We can work on large panels and pulley any lighting we are making up to a usable height,’ he says. (A chandelier in repairs currently hangs in pride of place.) High rose windows mean that celestial light pours, changing dramatically with the weather and time of day. Bishop has tacked smaller windows with coloured translucent acrylic sheets — a modern take on stained-glass designed to ward off nosy pedestrians.
The chapel is also significant for being in Farnham, which in 2022 was awarded World Craft City status (the only other UK recipient, though not a city, being the Western Isles in Scotland). As part of the process, Bishop presented the chapel to European representatives of the craft council. While the Dutch visitors were very on board, he remembers that one delegate from Spain was less convinced about the religious building’s conversion. ‘She said: It’s such a shame. And I said: But it was just empty before,’ recalls Bishop. ‘She said: Well, it’s still a shame.’
By filling the space with his own artefacts, Bishop has re-injected a sense of the sacred. He trained in multidisciplinary design and industrial ceramics, working at Wedgwood before he decided to pursue his own practice. He likes objects that err between the ‘mass-produced and the handmade’, and attributes his penchant for plaster to a love of Giacometti: ‘It’s design you can put in any place – new or old – and it works really well, with this hands-on texture.’ Although made on a commission basis, he can easily create facsimiles, as much of his work is produced with moulds. In the chapel studio, some Art Deco bas-reliefs (originally created for a private swimming pool) adorn the vaulted ceilings, and other miscellanea to be spotted include a Fabergé egg created for Nicky Haslam and some experimentations in stained glass, ‘for my bathroom window’.
The Chapel of Rest is ultimately a place of both productivity and pleasure for the artist. ‘It’s a beautiful place to work. I’m surrounded by trees, I go for walks with my wife every morning and it’s totally peaceful. I don’t get any “scary” vibes from it,’ he says. But ultimately the soul of the space remains. ‘It was never going to be a clean environment where people sit at computers,’ says Bishop, who also keeps a guitar in the studio. ‘The chapel has beautiful acoustics, so I play while the plasters are curing.’
