PAGANUS: Chapel in construction

The windows are made from folded up strips of cereal packet. Each window took about two days to make. The design is common in Somerset churches. I had to cheat with the arches as I couldn't bend folded card to the correct angle. Instead I used an arched insert over the inner wall to give the illusion that the window arched.

For the chancel roof, layers of coloured card are kept in place using corrugated card templates and wood glue. The blue starry sky design is loosely based on decoration in the side chapels of Notre Dame.

By contrast, the nave ceiling is largely copied from the tudor Choir roof in Peterborough Cathedral where I used to sing as a Lay Clerk. 

It took me ages to work out how to measure the right angles and curves to cut the card to the right dimensions to form the vaulting.

The bosses are my own design of zodiac signs and other constellations, each less than a cm in diameter, cut out from gold card from a Christmas cracker. 

The yellow background card is stained with tea bags to get a similar colour to the original in Peterborough.

The gold-black ribbing that joins the bosses is made from cocktail sticks and willow reed, all laboriously painted.

And below is the original in Peterborough. Mmm, putting the two photographs together makes me realise how different the colours in my model are from the original but it's too late now!

The central roof boss reflects my love of Star Wars: 

I decapitated a Yoda toy, set him in blue tack and surrounded him with modelling clay painted leaves to make him into a green man boss like the ones in Norwich Cathedral cloister.

The arches beneath the windows in the chancel are decorated with tiny leaves cut from card: oak, vine, ivy and holly. Below is how they looked before being stuck in place.

I debated for ages how to make the capitals of the chancel pillars, but eventually decided to use the same leaf technique as the arches, cutting out a strip of cardboard leaves, and then bending it round layers of card stuck to the pencil.

Opposite the tomb are some romanesque arches, copied from Peterborough and Durham Cathedrals, and Bristol library gateway. 

I eventually found a way to make the curved edges at the bottom of each arch, by curling strips of card, and then tea staining individual 'stones' to make it look less like one piece of cereal packet card.

The photographed skeleton monument in one of the arches is a detail from Norwich Cathedral and bears the inscription: 

"All you that do this place pass bye

Remember death for you must dye

As you are now even so was I

And as I am so shall you be.

Thomas Gooding here doth staye

Waiting for God's judgement daye."

The floor is printed out on a computer: I took a photo of some medieval tiles from Clarendon Place, hanging on the wall in the British Museum. I thought they deserved a chapel floor to belong to so I duplicated the design on the computer to fit my chapel, printed out the results and then scored it to feel like individual tiles.

The perfectionist in me now feels that the overall effect of the chapel is perhaps too colourful and busy to be realistic, and I wish I had studied ecclesiastical architecture's sense of proportion more before I started to better replicate the wall thicknesses, arch angles, vault thickness, etc. Still, it's been an imaginative adventure to create.