Performing Sanctuary
Kiki McGrath and Nathan Tucker
Introduction -- Nathan
What changes when we conceptualize the Christian concept of sanctuary less as consecrated space than as a performative act? Our interdisciplinary discussion explored historical examples of sanctuary in medieval anchorites, contemporary performance art, and the 1980s church sanctuary movement in the United States.
Medieval Anchorites: Performing sanctuary through presence --- Kiki
Anchorites take religious vows of permanent seclusion. In the Middle Ages these individuals lived in anchorholds—from a Greek word meaning to withdraw or retire from society. Ritually enclosed in rooms commonly attached to churches, they were devoted to prayer, the Eucharist, and offering spiritual guidance to their locals and pilgrims.
According to the 13th-century guide for female recluses, the Ancrene Riwle, "The anchoress anchors the church and holds it, so the waves and storms do not capsize it. Holy church anchors on the anchoress, for her to hold it so that the devils' blasts and temptations do not blow it over. This is her lifelong commitment" (Part 3, p. 51). 1 Anchoresses performed sanctuary not by offering physical shelter, but by inhabiting sacred spaces in ways that spiritually grounded and stabilized their communities.
In the 14th century, a mystic called Julian had a series of visions and wrote Revelations of Divine Love, the earliest known English-language text by a woman. For several decades she lived in an anchorhold attached to St. Julian’s Church in Norwich, England. After the church was destroyed in World War II, it was rebuilt on the original foundations. This is the door to her reconstructed enclosure.
The Anchorhold Project: A contemporary installation -- Kiki
The Anchorhold Project was an art installation located in a crypt where visitors were invited to explore and practice contemplative spirituality. It was inspired by Julian's mystical experiences and writings, and I wanted to trace a relationship between my then-home in Washington, DC, and Julian's medieval Norwich, so I sited the project in the National Cathedral, which is built in a fourteenth-century English Gothic style. The Center for Prayer and Pilgrimage hosted the project in a space next to St. Dunstan's Chapel and their library. We constructed an eight-foot-square cell lined with raw linen panels, and following instructions from the Ancrene Riule, sewed a white cross on a black window curtain to signify death to the world.
The three-part installation echoed the three windows of an anchorhold—one opening to the church for worship, one to the community for guidance, and one to a maid for sustenance and survival. For seven days I remained on-site, reading aloud and making drawings in response to Julian's text. Like a servant to an anchoress, I performed domestic labors—dusting, sweeping, hosting visitors—while protecting the seclusion of individuals inside the cell. I performed sanctuary through my intentional presence in the installation.
The Center's director offered public workshops on poetry and embodied spiritual practices. Some visitors walked into the enclosure and right back out; others lingered, and I could hear sounds of writing or murmuring behind the curtain. Families brought their children to draw and play with finger labyrinths, and small groups gathered in the communal area to talk about their experiences.
Over time, the installation developed into a collaborative project: cathedral staff contributed to a communal audio recording of Julian's short text, a local medievalist and librarian wrote a guide to Julian's works and translations, and a teacher led sacred dances in Julian's memory. By imagining a contemporary anchorhold as a space for hospitality, this project made visible some ways anchorites remained connected to their communities while living in seclusion. The enclosure was, in Sarah Law’s words, “the still centre of the local turning world” 2 which facilitated a deepening of connection and spiritual witness.
RITUAL AND PERFORMANCE: EMBODYING SANCTUARY
In choosing to take vows and enter the religious life of an anchoress, Julian committed to performing its daily rites: liturgical and private devotions and meditation. She also had time to contemplate her visions and write a longer, more complete version of Revelations of Divine Love. The anchorhold became both a domestic space and a site for creative labor—a medieval room of her own where she could think and write freely.
In the Middle Ages, a woman's public claims to direct experience of God could be dangerous. Marguerite Porete, a thirteenth-century mystic, was burned at the stake for her unconventional writings. The walls that enclosed Julian's body also protected her words, which come down to us today. She is now lauded as one of England's most important mystics.³
Her book became a portal for me, a way to envision her mystical experiences. I practiced lectio divina using a 1942 edition, a reprinting of Grace Warrack’s 1901 translation of the Long Text. In this altered artist book I made drawings of lilies and wounds, and a series of collages combining female bodies and domestic architecture—a theme that has been plumbed by a number of artists, including Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro in their 1972 feminist installation Womanhouse, Laurie Simmons in her 1989 photograph Walking House, and Louise Bourgeois in her 1994 sculpture Femme Maison. In the fourteenth revelation I collaged a hot pink anchorhold on top of pale-yellow medieval stockings; the image inhabits the text, and the words create an enclosure on the page.
Consumed: A Live Performance
Julian of Norwich described her experience of God with metaphors drawn from daily life—through fish scales, hazelnuts and blood. Her mystical insights also emerge through action and material things. To explore the physicality of her text, I created Consumed, a live performance that draws on the medieval European Christian practice of eating holy text. In that era, according to curator Elizabeth Sandoval, “people believed that words written and read, spoken and heard, could imprint on the brain, heart, and soul.” ⁴
Alone in the anchorhold, I read aloud from Revelations of Divine Love and copied lines of text onto paper. Combining the actions of manuscript-making with devotional gestures, I dusted the letters with gold powder and smoothed them with a bone folder, repetitively expanding my connection to the text to my other senses: smelling, licking, chewing, and swallowing words for spiritual nourishment.
Consumed transforms Julian's written revelations into physical experience, giving flesh to her insights through materials, bodies, space, and time. Rather than engaging her ideas through rational thinking alone, a durational performance makes them visceral—something that can be touched, witnessed, and felt. Through repeated actions that unfold over time, attention is honed and meaning is allowed to emerge from embodied memory and accumulated touch.
Reading is often imagined as a purely intellectual activity. But it has specific physical dimensions: paper and ink, hands turning pages, eyes that take in light. By making the “consumption” of the text literal, embodied, and almost uncomfortably visceral, I aimed to emphasize the theological implication that we read with both our minds and bodies because we are both matter and spirit.
CONNECTIONS TO CONTEMPORARY PERFORMANCE ART
The Anchorhold Project brought medieval enclosure practices into conversation with contemporary performance art. Tehching Hsieh's One Year Performance (1978-1979) and Bea Camacho's Enclose (2005) explored bodily confinement through isolation and endurance. While Anchorhold similarly engaged bodily enclosure, it differed by emphasizing connection rather than isolation.
In Embassy of the Refugee (2021), Mia Eve Rollow and Caleb Duarte collaborated with activists to build "an interactive, temporary sculpture that, as a pseudo-state institution, symbolically creates an autonomous space of refuge and creativity... and tests how the arts might assume the role of state authorities and governmental institutions by fostering understanding, empathy, and the idea of communal self-determination."⁵ The Anchorhold Project shared their work's concerns with community witness, mutual encounter, and reframing enclosure as collaborative and relational rather than withdrawing from the world. However, where Embassy of the Refugee pursued political aims, The Anchorhold Project centered spiritual ones.
SANCTUARY AS INCARNATIONAL EXPERIENCE
In developing this installation, I viewed the anchorhold as both sacred refuge and creative sanctuary. Just as an enclosure gave Julian safety to record her visionary experiences in the language of daily life, I wanted to create a space that offered physical, spiritual, emotional, and creative refuge.
Through intentional presence in the installation, I aimed to give incarnational form to these experiences—making sanctuary something embodied and communal rather than abstract. The project aimed to foster belonging and provide space for vulnerable voices, both now and across time, to create connections between Julian's medieval enclosure and contemporary practices of spiritual and creative labor. Sanctuary, then, was created not by consecrated walls but by acts of presence, ritual, and care.
1. The Ancrene Riwle, https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Ancrene_Wisse
2. https://medium.com/@sarahwriter/reflecting-on-julian-of-norwich-ca979725af49
Pelphrey, Brant (1989). Christ our Mother: Julian of Norwich. Wilmington, Delaware: Glazier. ISBN 978-0-89453-623-6.
4. https://artmuseum.williams.edu/embodied-words-reading-in-medieval-christian-visual-culture/