ART & CULTURE · DURHAM
Reading time: 8 minNicola Anthony has spent two decades turning the words people entrust her with into physical, luminous form, from a Holocaust survivor’s testimony cast in steel to a 100 metre projection across Liverpool Cathedral’s west front. At Durham, for the exhibition marking 800 years since the Magna Carta’s 1225 reissue, that practice becomes genuinely interactive for the first time: visitors do not just view the installation, they help build it.
Durham Cathedral’s Nave has carried a lot of light over the centuries, most of it filtered through nine hundred years of stone and glass. Since 11 July 2025 it has also carried a river of it moving across the floor: fragments of text, drawn from the Cathedral’s own medieval archive and from the words of people who live nearby, rippling underfoot as visitors walk through.
The installation is called The Words That Bind Us, and it is the centrepiece of Magna Carta and the North, the Cathedral’s exhibition marking the 800th anniversary of the 1225 reissue of the Magna Carta. It was made by the sculptor Nicola Anthony, working with the North East studio NOVAK on the technology that lets the piece respond to the people standing in it. The exhibition itself runs until 2 November 2025 and puts three of Durham’s own Magna Cartas on public display together for the first time since 2017.
What makes the commission worth writing about is not that it is beautiful, although it is. It is that Anthony has been building towards exactly this kind of piece for the better part of twenty years, and Durham is the first place she has made it answer back.
A river of light built from other people’s words
The Words That Bind Us projects moving fragments of text across the stone floor of the Nave, drawn from two sources: the Magna Cartas and Forest Charters in Durham Cathedral’s own collection, and words gathered from local community groups, schools and an online submission portal in the months before the installation opened. The result reads as a single continuous current of language rather than a fixed picture, shifting and reshaping as visitors move through the space.
The interactive layer is what separates this from a conventional light show. As visitors select the words and phrases that resonate with them, those choices grow within the projection in real time, building what Anthony calls a “Modern Charter”: a document with no fixed author, assembled live by whoever happens to be standing in the Nave that day. “I’ve had the privilege of working with communities across Durham and beyond, gathering fragments of wisdom, poetry, protest and prayer,” Anthony has said of the process. “It’s a living river of light and language, inviting visitors to reflect on justice, compassion and community.”
The technical work behind that responsiveness was built by NOVAK, a North East studio that specialises in projection mapping and immersive media design. Their director, Adam Finlay, has described the Durham commission as an opportunity the studio was “thrilled” to take on, and the collaboration is a genuine one: Anthony supplies the language and the visual language of the piece, NOVAK supplies the system that lets a floor full of moving light track and respond to a room full of moving people.
The practice this piece continues
Anthony’s work has followed a consistent method since she left Loughborough University in 2006, where her degree show was sponsored by Tate Britain and won her the AstraZeneca Commission the same year. She takes words that belong to real people, usually gathered through some form of community process, and gives them permanent or semi-permanent physical form. What changes from commission to commission is the material and the scale, not the underlying idea.
That method has taken her a long way from Durham. In 2018 she made Remembering Our Father’s Words for Steven Spielberg’s USC Shoah Foundation in Los Angeles, translating Holocaust survivor testimony into sculpture. In 2023, Murmuration, a permanent stainless steel piece carrying Irish-language text, was unveiled at the National University of Ireland as part of Galway’s year as European Capital of Culture. The same year produced her largest work before Durham: Metamorphosis, a 100 metre light projection across the west front of Liverpool Cathedral. She has represented the UK at Dubai Expo 2020, shown at the Singapore Art Museum and the Kuala Lumpur Biennale, and was a finalist for the Sovereign Asian Art Prize in 2021. Her work sits in the Ingram Collection in the UK and the Goldrich Family Foundation in the United States.
Read against that list, Durham is not her biggest commission by scale, but it is the first to close the loop between the words a community gives her and the form the piece takes. Metamorphosis projected fixed content onto a building. The Words That Bind Us changes shape depending on who is in the room. It is the version of her practice that finally does in real time what the rest of her career has been doing over months of workshops: turn what people say into something the room can hold.
The studio that keeps making old documents glow
NOVAK’s involvement is worth dwelling on, because it is not the first time the studio has been trusted with a nation’s founding paperwork. The same studio built the immersive Book of Kells Experience for Trinity College Dublin, bringing Ireland’s most celebrated illuminated manuscript into a room visitors can walk through rather than a case they can only look into. More recently, NOVAK created the light display for the Lindisfarne Gospels exhibition at the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle, the last time that manuscript travelled south from the British Library to the region where it was made.
Put those three projects next to each other and a pattern appears that neither Durham Cathedral nor NOVAK has drawn attention to directly: a single North East studio now has a working specialism in taking Britain and Ireland’s most significant surviving documents, the Book of Kells, the Lindisfarne Gospels, and now the Magna Carta and Forest Charters, and finding a way to make them glow. It is a strange, specific expertise to have built, and Durham’s Nave is the latest and most interactive result of it.
What sits alongside the light
The Words That Bind Us is the contemporary centrepiece of a much older story. Magna Carta and the North puts three original issues of the Magna Carta on public display together for the first time since 2017, when the same grouping drew nearly 19,000 visitors over eleven weeks. On show are the only surviving copy of the 1216 issue, the 1225 issue whose 800th anniversary the exhibition marks, and the 1300 issue, alongside three Charters of the Forest, the companion documents that historically governed ordinary people’s access to land and natural resources.
These are not loans. “We care for an extensive medieval archive here at Durham Cathedral, and the Magna Cartas and Forest Charters are some of the most remarkable documents within it,” says Alison Cullingford, the Cathedral’s Head of Libraries and Collections. That the documents belong to Durham rather than arriving for a temporary showing is part of what makes the exhibition possible at this scale.
The historic documents sit in the Cathedral’s museum, ticketed separately at £7.50 for adults and free for under-18s. The Nave installations, Anthony’s light piece and a second work by the photographer and artist Ash Mills, are free to enter, with donations welcomed. Mills has spent two decades making large-scale voile installations for English cathedrals, including a long-running relationship with Salisbury Cathedral between 2004 and 2021, and his contribution to Magna Carta and the North suspends stained glass inspired illustrations between the columns of the Cathedral’s West End and in the Galilee Chapel, weaving medieval motifs into the exhibition’s telling of the Magna Carta’s legacy. “Ash’s work brings a visual richness to the exhibition,” says Andrew Usher, Durham Cathedral’s Chief Officer for Visitor Experience and Enterprise. “It invites visitors to look up and reflect on how the ideals of Magna Carta continue to shape our world.”
A cathedral that keeps returning to light
Durham has form with illuminating its own Nave. Since 2022, the immersive light and sound specialists Luxmuralis have staged an annual evening installation at the Cathedral, a separate, ticketed programme distinct from the daytime exhibition. This year’s edition, The Storytellers, runs alongside Magna Carta and the North with a joint ticket on offer for visitors who want both, but it is Luxmuralis’s own fourth consecutive commission rather than part of Anthony’s piece.
The distinction matters, because it shows what Anthony’s commission is not. It is not a seasonal light show designed to draw evening crowds. It is a piece built specifically to sit inside a museum exhibition about a single set of documents, open in daylight, free to enter, and designed to be walked through rather than watched from a seat. Durham has clearly worked out that its Nave can hold more than one kind of light installation without either one diminishing the other, so long as each is honest about what it is for.
Final thoughts
The Magna Carta was, among other things, an attempt to bind a small group of specific grievances into a document that could speak for people who were never in the room when it was written. The Words That Bind Us runs the same trick in the opposite direction: it takes a room full of specific, present people and lets their words build something that briefly speaks for the space they are standing in.
Nicola Anthony has been assembling the pieces of this idea for most of her career, one commission at a time, in steel, in stone, in fixed projected light. Durham is where the idea finally became responsive, built with a technical partner whose own quiet specialism turns out to be doing exactly this for the country’s most important documents. The result is an installation that will only exist in this form until 2 November 2025, but the practice behind it, and the studio behind its technology, both look built to keep doing this again.
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