2001: The ‘elegant’ or ‘ugly’ Chalice
It was dubbed the ‘‘cone of contention’’ until, suddenly, everyone loved it.
It was a typical Christchurch story. A public artwork was commissioned, in this case the Chalice sculpture by Neil Dawson, to mark 150 years of the Canterbury Settlement and noisy opposition immediately ramped up while the object itself was delayed.
‘‘It has been bigger than Ben Hur, but it is not far off now,’’ said Anna Crighton, then a city councillor, in July 2001.
It finally appeared in Cathedral Square a month later. Letter writers called it an ‘‘ugly piece of steel’’, ‘‘a giant rubbish bin’’ and ‘‘a giant ice cream cone’’. Another dubbed it ‘‘the Holey Grail’’.
But within days of its official launch, the world was horrified and moved by the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York and the Chalice became the spot where people left flowers and messages.
‘‘The Chalice has style and elegance’’ and has ‘‘a spirituality suited to our secularised age, movingly confirmed by the floral tributes spontaneously left at its base,’’ as art history lecturer Mark Stocker wrote in The Press.
‘‘Thank God for the Chalice.’’ Dawson himself commented: ‘‘It’s been absolutely thrilling to see the flowers and messages build up. It has become a sort of shrine. People have taken it up as something they visually like and revere.’’
Twenty years later, the Chalice seems inseparable from the city’s identity and history.
160 Years is a series marking the launch of The Press newspaper in Christchurch on May 25, 1861.