What would you do with one day more?

A leap year creates opportunities.

Jamie Mulvaney

Jamie is Vicar of St Michael's Chester Square, London.

Looking straight down on someone sitting in an armchair working on a laptop. They are surrounded by clock numerals and hands on the floor.

Kevin Ku on Unsplash.

We're all going into extra time. If you've found yourself thinking, 'If only I had some more time', then this is the year for you. Congratulations. So how are you going to make the most of the extra day we're gifted? In a leap year, the 29th February square sits quietly there on the calendar, with little fanfare, unless you're one of the unfortunate souls to be celebrating your quadrennial birthday. But it's not just another Thursday. It's redemption time if you've ever flown east across the international date line and wondered where that day disappeared, never to return.

When you think about extra time in football, the pressure is only heightened, the anticipation and trepidation palpable. Willy Wonka - no, not the recent foppish Timothée Chalamet, but Gene Wilder – famously got muddled when he feverishly announced, 'We have so much time, and so little to do!' Unlike Otis Redding, sittin' on the dock of the bay, wasting time, we have learnt to squeeze more and more into our days, making the most of the time.

I'm not immune. I've recently begun using an AI app for scheduling meetings and tasks. This app promises to turbocharge my productivity by 137 per cent. Somehow it boasts, 'There are now 13 months in a year'. Of course, there's little way of measuring just how super-duper-extra-productive this is going to make me but so far, I still seem to only have seven days in my week. So, if we were to stop spinning on our hamster wheels of productivity for a moment, and take a look at time (given with this extra day we have the time to do so), how might we make the most of it?

The essence of time must mean both its quality and its quantity.

It's worth measuring not only how much time we have, but the quality of the time we have. We know how to measure time, but how do we measure this measure? Time is of the essence. But what is the essence of time? For Charles Dickens, the best of times and the worst of times went hand-in-hand. The apostle Paul warned the church in Ephesus to make the most of every opportunity, 'because the days are evil'. Is time neutral? Perhaps we should ask the women and children of Afghanistan after the Doha agreement was signed on the last 29th February, with ominous consequences. Every day has the capacity for good and evil, including in a leap year. And if the days are evil, then as we consider how we live, as the King James Version puts it, that we can 'redeem the time'.

Then there's not only redeeming the time in terms of its quality, but also its quantity. Eventually, one day (quite some time away), HS2 will mean there's 32 minutes 'saved' for those travelling between Birmingham and London. And how many times have you said or heard recently that you've 'run out of time'? Our society treats time as a scarce commodity. There's regret over the time that we have wasted on an unworthy Netflix offering, on doom-scrolling, or that time in the post office queue we'll never get back.

I recently went to a memorial service of a friend who died in her early 60s. It was not only a sober reminder that we don't know how much time we have, but also an inspiration to live like someone who made the most of her days, by helping others to make the most of their time.

The essence of time must mean both its quality and its quantity. Richard Curtis' film About Time invites us into the relationship between a father and son who have the power to travel through time. While the lesson learnt is that we have the power to make the most of every day, the bulk of the film is really about the relationship. Any time he wants, the son can escape back to Cornwall and play table tennis or skim pebbles along the water with his dad. These experiences beyond his own linear timeline teach him how to live in his present reality.

Christianity also invites us to live in the love between a Father and a Son, and from that place we keep time. Jesus spoke about eternal life: not only a quantity of life beyond death, but a quality of life that we can experience beginning today. Sure, we can't escape the reality of any of the worst times around us, but we can invite the best of times of eternity into today. Maybe our relationship with time is so fraught because we were made to live beyond time.

The wristband on my watch recently fell apart. I suppose you could say I've been walking around without time on my hands. Time doesn't need to be elusive, slipping away from us. Time, just like the day, can be seized and grasped. King David wrote of God: 'my times are in your hands'. A leap year gives us a whole extra day of deadlines, potential ephemeral joys and sorrows. Perhaps putting our hope not in today, nor tomorrow, but into the hands of the maker of time is the greatest leap.

Review

Art

Character

Creed

Easter

Suffering

18 April 2025

5 min read

Why sculpt the face of Christ?

In Nic Fiddian Green’s work we feel pain, strength, fear and wisdom.

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A man looks up a shaft of light that illuminates him and a crucifix higher up a wall.

I Accepted, 2025.

Richard Foster.

The seeds of faith were sown in the life of Nic Fiddian Green by his father. As he has explained recently, he “was shown a way and a faith, and an understanding around the faith of Christianity, in the way my father lived”.

Later, his wife-to-be, Henrietta Hutley, asked him to help create Stations of the Cross for the Wintershall Estate in Surrey where, today, The Nativity and the Life of Christ are regularly performed. Henrietta’s father, Peter, wrote and brought The Passion of Jesus to Trafalgar Square, while her mother, Anne, had the vision for the Stations of the Cross project after a life-changing visit to Medjugorje.

Fiddian Green says that “The Face of Christ has been with me for over 40 years” and that he has “searched for His face through my art as part of my spiritual journey, and also in the work of many others – especially Renaissance artists like Giotto, Piero della Francesca and Michelangelo”.

Fiddian Green, who is internationally celebrated for his monumental equine sculptures, has created a deeply personal and spiritually resonant exhibition entitled The Face of Christ. The exhibition features 20 new sculptures including works in bronze, copper, lead, marble, plaster, and silver, together with a series of drawings. The exhibition ranges from the Nativity to the Resurrection but focuses primarily on the crucifixion.

The exhibition is deeply personal for Fiddian Green because it is informed by the harrowing encounters he had with an array of life-threatening illnesses a few years ago. These caused an obvious and honest creative re-assessment and it is from these experiences that a stronger, deeper and more contemplative vision has emerged. One that permeates the new work via modes of stillness and reflection.

The Face of Christ offers a profoundly meditative engagement with the image of Christ, capturing a sense of serenity, resilience, and transcendence in bronze and stone. In these works, he shows us how his spirit and his faith help him triumph over the physical as he explores the enduring power of faith, suffering and redemption. In the eyes of his work, we feel pain, strength, fear, wisdom and more as he asks questions of the viewer that leave a powerful and spiritual resonance.

Fiddian Green says: “These works are a reflection of my journey of faith. I have come to find that His power to elevate us underpins everything I strive to do and The Face of Christ is an attempt for me to convey in my work all that He conveys in my heart. Christ gives me the key, but will I open the door…?”

A sketch shows the hanging head of Christ wearing a crown of thorns.

This Storm Will Pass, 2024. Slademore Gallery.

A crucifix hands on a round-topped slab.

I Paid, 1993. Slademore Gallery.

Crown of Thorns, 2025. Nic Fiddian Green.

While the exhibition focuses on the crucifixion and the face of the crucified Christ, the expression on Christ’s face is generally one of peace, rather than pain. In part, this is because many of the heads of Christ included are images of Christ resting in death prior to the resurrection. The brokenness that the crucifixion brought is shown in these images through damage to the body of Christ, as opposed to the expressions on his face. This is most powerfully the case with ‘Broken for You’, a bronze crucifixion sculpture where Christ’s torso, as well as being scarred by a long spear-like fissure, has also been fractured with the two parts fused together using brace brackets. Similar fissures appear on other of the crucifixion sculptures but ‘Broken for You’ goes furthest in graphically showing the pain Christ endured on our behalf.

It seems to me that Fiddian Green could go further in revealing the horrors that Christ endured and that his love of Renaissance art with its focus on beauty and balance might hold him back in this regard. Another artist to have regularly depicted the Crucifixion in images shown in mainstream galleries in recent years is Peter Howson, whose images of the crucifixion are much more expressionist graphically capturing the depth of pain that Christ endured. Fiddian Green’s drawings, more than his sculptures, tap into the sense of pain endured, particularly ‘This Storm will Pass’, a partial image of the face of the crucified Christ which in its frenetic pencil-marks and incomplete state speaks particularly powerfully.

Fiddian Green, by contrast, primarily gives us a sense of the peace that he receives from Christ on the face of Christ. ‘I Forgive’, a bronze head of the crucified Christ depicts the love with which Christ looks on us as he endures the cross. ‘Christ is Laid to Rest’ is a huge head encircled by a crown of massive spikey thorns with green verdigris overtones suggesting the sweat and blood of anguish which has led to the completion of purpose that Christ finds in death. ‘Peace’, a plaster sculpture of Christ’s head, is also redolent of the supreme achievement of the cross; ‘It is finished’, meaning that all his work is complete and done, enabling him to rest and enabling us to enter rest.

In these images, Fiddian Green is reading back into the events of the crucifixion the outcomes that it gains for us and showing, in his Christ figures, the peace that he personally finds in the love and forgiveness which overflows from the crucified Christ to each and every human being throughout time and history.

Fiddian Green writes of having “been given materials to use by the God of heaven and earth” – those materials of the earth that he uses in his sculptures – and says that “it is my hope that some of these pieces may rest and resonate with those who see it; that they may find a deep connection by gazing on the works which takes the eye, the heart and the soul to the One who helped me create them”.

While Lent, Holy Week and Easter are often times when art is offered to enable us to walk in the footsteps of Christ it is not common for commercial galleries to specifically invite meditation on these events, so don’t miss the opportunity for contemplation that the Sladmore Gallery is providing through this exhibition.

The Face of Christ, 10th April – 2nd May 2025, Sladmore Gallery, London.

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