Stations of the Cross

By the WuDesign workshop, Thottakkadu · Photographs are of our own work · Updated 5 September 2026

In short

Full fourteen-panel sets, machined together so every panel matches.
Ten to fourteen weeks from the signed drawing.
A finished set hangs at Nalkodi Church, Kottayam, and can be visited.

A set of stations is not fourteen panels. It is one panel made fourteen times, and a parish notices the moment one of them is not. That is why we machine a full set together on our own CNC: the same relief depth, the same margin and the same shoulder on every figure, so the eye moves down the nave without catching. Each panel is then finished by hand at the bench, because the machine gets it close and the hand gets it right.

The set below is cut in seasoned teak and hangs in the nave at Nalkodi Church, in Kottayam district. It can be seen at any time the church is open, which is worth more to a committee than any photograph on a website.

Relief depth is chosen from the wall the panels will hang on, not from a catalogue. We measure the sanctuary ourselves and watch how the light moves across it through the day, because a panel that reads beautifully at ten in the morning can go flat by four. Every subject is redrawn for the parish that orders it, and nothing here is a fixed product.

Jesus falls the first time
The first fall. Relief depth is cut deepest here so the figure reads from the pew.
Teak · Nalkodi Church
Jesus meets his mother
The meeting on the road. Usually the panel a parish asks to see first.
Teak · Nalkodi Church
Simon of Cyrene helps Jesus
The compelled helper. Two figures sharing one beam.
Teak · Nalkodi Church
Veronica wipes the face of Jesus
The cloth and the imprinted face, carved as a separate shallow plane.
Teak · Nalkodi Church
Jesus falls the second time
The second fall, cut lower in the frame than the first.
Teak · Nalkodi Church
Jesus meets the women of Jerusalem
Weep not for me. A group panel, the hardest of the fourteen to compose.
Teak · Nalkodi Church
Jesus falls the third time
The third fall, at the foot of the hill.
Teak · Nalkodi Church
Jesus is stripped of his garments
Carved with restraint. Drapery does the work of the scene.
Teak · Nalkodi Church
Jesus is nailed to the cross
The nailing. The panel most often placed where light falls hardest.
Teak · Nalkodi Church
Jesus dies on the cross
The twelfth station. In most naves this is the panel opposite the pulpit.
Teak · Nalkodi Church
Jesus is taken down from the cross
The Deposition. Ladders, the body lowered, the mourners below.
Teak · Nalkodi Church