Draw near with faith, and… is a recent work that is now part of Volume 16 of the Brooklyn Art Library Sketchbook Project and explores the ideas of what it means to draw near with faith, and lean in to the idea of living and working as an artist.
This work explores the role of memory in my experience of faith and within the context of public worship. The first page of this book is a simple response to words from scripture as I heard them in public worship, “Draw near with faith, and….”. I stopped listening at this moment and began to wonder about my own response to what it is like to draw near with faith and in doing so I discovered a myriad of possibilities beginning to emerge. Having begun by tracing around my holding cross with graphite pencils in church, I spent time through the week playing with oil pastels and finding colours that would speak to my felt sense of the Spirit in the places I had drawn. Along with shape and colour, there other moments when text became important. The combination of pencil and oil pastel began a process of imprinting layers of text and imagery on the different pages of the journal. This speaks to my experience of faith – the text that is the story along with the experience of the Spirit echoing through layers of time and creating a new possibility for the future. Just after the half way mark of this diary – we found ourselves living in isolation, due to the global pandemic known as the Coronavirus. For this time we were not able to meet together in church. Our Sunday mornings were spent on Zoom watching someone worship at a distance. My felt sense of this massive change called for a different process in the journal. I stopped laying down the complex graphite patterns created by tracing around the holding cross and I employed a water based medium to lay down colour. The water-based graphite seeped through the pages, creating its own new possibilities on the pages that would be the days ahead. The memory of being in worship was inscribed some form of map that would give a shape to work with in the experience of isolation. Along with scripture, poetry always seems to offers a lense through which I am able to really see the nature of my spiritual journey. David Whyte’s poetry has accompanied me in this work. His poem ‘Everything is waiting for you’, was there with me as I began the process and as the work has drawn to a conclusion I have discovered the poem, ‘Working Together’. In the final pages of this work I realised that I had begun writing Draw near in faith, rather than Draw near with faith. It seems that as we draw near in faith, everything is waiting for us and yet nothing is fixed. Just as the shape of one drawing fits with and re-shapes another, my faith is formed and re-formed with through memories that are imprinted from the experience of being in worship alongside other people. This is the map that leads me into the days ahead – “…the visible and the invisible, working together in common cause” (David Whyte)
That said, the work is also haunted by the question that whispers through my studio, the materials and my lived experience – who really is an artist – and who cares anyway.
The idea has been rattling away in me for years now and so this work led me to write a chapter for a recently published in a book edited by Jason Goroncy and Rod Pattenden, Imagination in an Age of Crisis: Soundings from the Arts and Theology. If the intro to this chapter piques your interest maybe the idea speaks to you too…
“Our lives are made of stories—some of them big, some small, some complex and convoluted, some simple. Some we may keep to ourselves and some we share with others.”[1] When I introduce myself by saying, “I am an artist,” I begin sharing a complex story that is shaped and re-shaped in the experience of the telling. There is nothing fixed about living into my identity as an artist. The context in which I choose to share this story shapes and re-shapes the way I perceive my identity as an artist, and I often find myself communicating from a strange “state of self-negotiation”.[2] There are times when claiming to be an artist leaves me feeling isolated from other people and in the loneliness of this place I begin to wonder how and why I have come to think of myself in this way. More broadly, I wonder how it is that some people find the wherewithal to identify and live as an artist, whilst others seem to persistently negotiate complex experiences of desire and resistance, before ultimately rejecting the idea of being an artist in the world. In this chapter I work toward understanding the experience of this conundrum, by employing art materials to examine layers of my experience with art and people. The ideas and perceptions that have imprinted and seeped through my consciousness from one layer of coherence into the next reveal what it is like for me to, “Draw near with faith, and . . .”. This work is embedded in a small A5 Sketchbook that now resides in the Brooklyn Art Library.[3] This artefact has awakened me to think more deeply and care about what it means for me to be an artist, in the experience of making, exhibiting, and being with other people as together we care enough to see and respond to the call of desire that resides and resounds in the world through the presence of art.
[1] Lawson, “Using Narrative and Story Telling in Research,” 183.
[2] Luger, “But I’m Just an Artist?,” 1329.
[3] Byrne, “Draw near in faith, and . . .”