“It’s God working through me,” Beverley Shore Bennett MBE FMGP
Beverley Shore Bennett died at Waikanae on September 3rd 2024. A portrait artist and ecclesiastical embroiderer she was widely known in NZ as a stained glass window designer.
Born in Wellington in 1928, Beverley lived a full and productive life. Always creative, she trained as a portrait artist for two years at the Byam Shaw School of Art, London. Back home in New Zealand, she accepted numerous portrait commissions and exhibited at The NZ Academy of Fine Arts.
It was through her membership of the St. Mary’s Church Karori Mothers’ Union that she began to make ecclesiastical embroidery; designing church banners, altar linen and hangings, and ecclesiastical robes. This led to the designing and organising of the making of the baptismal font for the Wellington Cathedral of St. Paul. In 1968 Dean Walter Hurst was looking for an artist to design a stained glass window to honour the founder of the Holm Shipping Company, Captain Ferdinand Holm and his wife. Accepting this commission was the beginning of a new career as a stained glass designer. Over the next 30 years, she designed about 300 stained glass windows in over 100 churches and schools throughout New Zealand. She collaborated throughout this time with Roy Miller of Miller Studios in Dunedin. Roy was a very sympathetic colleague who skilfully brought her designs to life in the physical making of the windows. In 1978 they both became the first New Zealanders to be made Fellows of the prestigious British Society of Master Glass Painters.
In 1976, Edward Norman, Bishop of Wellington, installed Beverley as a lay canon in the Wellington diocese in recognition of her artistic contribution to the diocese. She was awarded an MBE in 1980 for services to the Arts. In 1983 she became a lay reader in the Waikanae parish, a position she held until she turned 80. In 1990 she designed and made ‘Christ in Glory’ a large dossal hanging for The Wellington Cathedral. Beverley was awarded a Bishop’s medal by the Anglican diocese of Wellington in April 2012.
Beverley had a deep spiritual faith. She always said about her work, “It’s not me it’s God working through me”. In 2005, at the dedication of the final three windows in the Waiapu Anglican Cathedral Napier, Beverley wrote, “Glass is not just beauty but communication; it should lead you to ponder, recollect and be inspired by the great Christian truths”.
Many thanks to Sylvia Cavanagh, who penned this reflection.
