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72 Sir Laurence Whistler CBE (1912-2000) Laurence Whistler was an artist and poet who spent most of his life in Wiltshire, and was married in the cathedral. It took 40 years to design a suitable memorial to his elder brother Rex, also a talented artist, who died in Normandy in 1944. After winning the King's Medal for poetry in 1935, Laurence turned away from verse and devoted himself to glass engraving, binding sheets of black paper together and using chalk to sketch his designs. Scenes of architecture were meticulously traced and transferred with carbon paper. He used a steel point held like a pencil and a softer point in a slowly revolving drill to create the images on the prism. He engraved on just one side with reflection on the other mingling organic with inorganic, with intriguing properties of darkness and light. The prism slowly revolves to reveal a series of images of the cathedral endlessly merging into one another, the spire with clouds and birds, the vista down the Nave and the great pillar of the Chapter house branching into the ceiling above, passing at one point a ghostly image of the Walton canonry which was Rex 's home for the last six years of his life. This memorial is an inspiring tribute to the love of a brother to another, translated into images which may speak to us all of the astonishing spiritual power of the cathedral and remind us of the truth for which it stands. As Laurence said, "this not merely a peepshow with optical trickery with no sacred meaning". The Rex Prism, 1987 Full crystal glass donated by Stephen Steuben of New York. Bronze lantern donated by the Welsh Guards cast by Richard Cowdy, engraved by Henry Bowler-Reed and Tony Willis and gilded by Richard Healy. Purbeck stone corbel donated by the cathedral 38cm Gift to the Cathedral by the artist In this tribute to a lost brother, the movement refuses to let you stay with any single image. What does this say to you about life and death?