Design

'The Last Supper' sculpted out of concrete and keyboard keys is heavenly

We'd expect nothing less from a cathedral which also has a work-in-progress model of itself made out of Lego.

Last Supper keyboard mosaic sculpture
Chester Cathedral

Leonardo Da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” gets a modern update in this sculpture by Peter Barnes. The massive work is decked out in keyboard keys, creating a mosaic effect outside of the typical tile-fragment-based medium. The sculpture was meant to be viewable in the UK’s Chester Cathedral until early May, but additional photos have popped up on the church’s as well as others’ social media pages as recently as Wednesday, suggesting it's still going strong.

The sculpture began with a clay base back, last seen in 2010. Six years later, with classic Windows keys, in black and white, Barnes began the mosaic process. The keys appear to be only taken from keyboards for the English language. Facial expressions are hard to come by with such color and size limitations compared to a typical mosaic, but the statue finds other ways to draw you in, from 360 degrees of detail...

...to the cheeky word searches.

This is a pretty fun church — In addition to the sculpture, Chester Cathedral is quite the hotspot in Cheshire County. Its previously astroturfed indoor movie nights have moved outdoors in the pandemic in partnership with Moonlight Flicks. The grounds also housed falcons for a time, but COVID-19 precautions have forced their caretakers to find new homes for them.

For most places of worship, that'd be more than enough merriment, but Chester Cathedral is also in the middle of an unusual fundraiser for its education trust. A replica of the medieval cathedral is being gradually put together out of Lego pieces. Each piece costs one pound sterling and as of the beginning of this year, more than 200,000 bricks have been added. Religion wasn't this much fun when we were children. Or if it was, it hid it really well.