June Messenger 2022
Art and Faith
We chose the theme of ‘Art and Faith’ to explore in this Messenger as we anticipate hosting a major art installation at St John’s in the City in July/August this year. ‘Luminary: He Tinana Tiretiera (The Dawning of Dreams) is coming to St John’s in the City as the final stop in the Aotearoa New Zealand Church & Cathedral Tour 2022. The work is by Karen Sewell, a significant Auckland artist, recently returned from this year’s Venice Biennale where her work was featured as a collateral part of the 2022 Venice Biennale. We are delighted to have the opportunity to host this installation to both showcase it as a fascinating artwork and to offer an opportunity for the wider Wellington community to connect with St Johns, as a faith community engaging our Christian faith with life in its fullness.
As well as looking forward to enjoying this art installation at St John’s, there are opportunities to participate in the hosting of this in our city. This is how we do things as a Church family – there’s always a part each of us can take to contribute to the experience! Please let David Galt know if you are interested: david@galt.net.nz
Historically, the relationship between the Church and the arts has been much closer, as the Church was a major patron of the arts. We hope the suspicion and pride that has caused the Church to pull back from the arts may be replaced with curiosity and collaboration once again, as we find inspiration and imagination that speaks to our hearts about the meaning and goodness of God.
Is there a form of art you are drawn to? Or a specific piece of art you love? What was it about that you found significant?
This reflection by Sister Wendy Beckett caught my attention about the relationship of art and faith:
Artists have an awareness of something greater than themselves, as do most of us. The crucial difference is that they can make this awareness visible. Art draws us out of our own smallness into what one could call a vision for which there are no words. We experience it through the artist's skill, but to reach this experience we have to look very closely at what the artist has done. We cannot encompass the liberating power of the vision unless we understand the essential elements of the story. Looking closely and letting the work reveal itself to us is a paradigm of all looking. How are we to seek God if we do not look?
Once we have learned the deep joy of looking at art--which can also be an alarming challenge, when we see things in ourselves that we would rather not see--we are emboldened in our looking at the life in which we are embedded.
One of the verses of Scripture that moves me most deeply is the great cry with which Jesus died on the cross: "It is finished." He had fulfilled completely the will of his Father. He had never neglected or passed by that holy will, displaying itself in the most ordinary of circumstances.
None of us can come even near this wonder of "consummation." We have missed so much, not out of malice but through sheer ignorance and lack of interest. We do not take enough trouble, to paraphrase St John Vianney. God was there but we did not see him.
When you look at [art], really look, opening your heart to take in what is there before you, you are not only responding to a particular work of art, you are practicing the habit of openness to the beauty of God as he illuminates every moment of your every day. Understood correctly, appreciating and understanding art is a profound form of prayer. It changes us. Or rather, it will change us if we allow the Holy Spirit to utter within us the total yes of Jesus to the Father.
- Sister Wendy Beckett, ‘Sister Wendy on the Art of Christmas’ (Franciscan Media, Cincinnati: 2013)
I pray the contributions below, from Karen Sewell, Ian Garret, John Irvine, Rebecca Wilcox and Gail Higgs-West, will indeed help you appreciate and understand art as it engages our faith.
For the younger and more ‘tactile’ we have included some colouring pages for you to print and colour. We would love it if you can share these with us. Please give colouring-in to the Minister at Church, or send to the St John’s Office enquiries@stjohnsinthecity.org.nz
Colouring St Johns in the City 1
Colouring St Johns in the City 2
Colouring St Johns in the City 3
At times art might seem abstract and aloof, but art at its best connects us with life by helping us see the mystery, beauty and wonder around us every day. Art also explores the dark corners of suffering and injustice to grow our responses of compassion and our thirst for Grace. Art exposes truths more clearly, asks questions of ourselves and our world, holds together ambiguities embraces the mystery of Love.
Rev Allister Lane
a.lane@stjohnsinthecity.org.nz
Imagination and Art
As an artist, I find that creativity and imagination are not just things that I need when creating art or painting a picture. In fact they are crucial in helping me participate with God in his good work of ushering in his kingdom.
When we think about the past, or anticipate the future, when we read a book and picture it in our mind, or when someone describes something to us, we are using our imagination.
We are allowing our imagination to help us access reality, and in the same way, we can allow our imagination to help us access God, and the reality of his kingdom.
Nobel peace prize winner and physicist, Frank Wilczek is a quantum theorist, and he’s interested in how science and beauty intercept. He speaks of the importance of using imagination in his work, imagining how equations and laws of nature and physics might be solved in different ways. He relies on his imagination a lot in order to attempt to understand what he describes as a very unfamiliar world.
This resonates with me in both my life as an artist and as a Christian. As Christians, we live now, in this broken and hurting world. Yet we are also citizens of heaven, a kingdom of light and love, and we are being called to participate with God in ushering that kingdom into this world. However that new world is very unfamiliar to us living in the here and now. We can read in the bible about how God created this world, and how he intended it to be, and what it was like when Jesus walked the earth, but that all means nothing if we don’t begin to imagine what that might actually look like in reality. What does this unfamiliar kingdom and this unfamiliar way of life look like in this broken world? What does it look like in my city? In my neighbourhood? In my family? In my life? And when we begin to imagine it, we begin to understand what that means for us and how much God loves us. We can see ways in which we can participate in not only the imagining, but the doing as well.
When we read the Bible, and we imagine what that might look like, or how it might play out in the reality of the world we live in and in the reality of our lives - and when that imagining aligns with God’s will and his Word, I believe that is God speaking to us.
I believe that it’s actually really important for all of us, creative people or not, to use our imagination to help us to hear from God. But I think especially that Christian artists need to be taken seriously. Whether it is painted, sculptured, sung, written in poetry, captured in a photograph, or strummed on a guitar, it is important and divine work to imagine and create something that helps us to experience God, and to see the world in a different and unfamiliar way.
Rebecca Wilcox is an experienced youth worker and visual artist who hails from Taranaki. She is the Assistant Chaplain at Scots College.
Painting by Gail Higgs-West
Commentary by Rev Allister Lane
Gail has painted this and invites you to look at it and allow it to speak to you. She believes it is up to the individual viewer to see a painting through their eyes.
In creating this, Gail acknowledges some of the meditations in the painting comes from Psalm 121 (paraphrased below). The painting is titled ‘Nor the Moon by Night’. David is looking upwards and asking ‘Where does my help come from? He acknowledges “My help comes from the Lord who made heaven and earth”. Some of Gail’s thought process at the time of painting were “The earth belongs to God, He made it and we are his caretakers”. We do not own it. There are pitfalls in our journey. Our Lord gives us strength.
Life's mountains to climb
travelling through life
Sailing through life
God showing us a straight path
Smiting - sharp points - dangers
rocks and stones and textures of the earth
God's love and understanding of his people
What features of this Psalm can you recognise in Gail’s painting?
What else do you see is meaningful to you in the painting?
The words in te reo Māori translate as this:
E TE WHANAU - OH FAMILY
A TE KARAITI - OF CHRIST
TENA KIA WAIATA - PLEASE SING – LET US SING
TATOU KI A IHOWA - LET US GO THE LORD
The words in te reo Māori were given by a friend to express our acknowledgement and love of God for allowing us life on his planet. That the earth belongs to the Lord
We know how contentious issues of land ownership here in Aotearoa NZ. How does this ascription, that the land belongs to God, relate to our human understandings of ownership and possession?
What does it mean to say the land belongs to God? Is this about God’s agency as Creator (‘Patent pending’)? Is this about God’s relationship to the land, and that God is responsible and cares for the land? Does it suggest God has purposes for the land that take priority? Might we all unite in a spiritual understanding in God’s ownership?
Might these theological understandings help us to navigate the differing worldviews of tangata whenua and tauiwi?
‘Creation Day 6 Gen 1:24 – 31’ by Ian Garrett
Commentary by Rev Allister Lane
This is a painting by our own Ian Garrett titled ‘Day 6’, which is part of a Creation series that hung in St John’s recently.
Ian’s inspiration came from Genesis 1:24-31
24 And God said, ‘Let the earth bring forth living creatures of every kind: cattle and creeping things and wild animals of the earth of every kind.’ And it was so. 25 God made the wild animals of the earth of every kind, and the cattle of every kind, and everything that creeps upon the ground of every kind. And God saw that it was good.
26 Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.’
27 So God created humankind in his image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.
28God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.’ 29God said, ‘See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. 30And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.’ And it was so. 31God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.
In his painting, Ian has identified and expressed some important themes of humankind created in God’s image – the most immediate feature is that of relationality. The human figures of different generations stand in relationship to each other, holding hands and facing the beauty of God’s creation. This is something the Bible makes very clear is the purpose of humanity – to be in relation with God, each other and creation, and enjoying it all!
The road they are standing on draws our eyes to the distance – giving a sense of a destination and journey ahead. This is a visual metaphor for our lives together, as a Church family.
What other features of the Genesis passage can you see in Ian’s painting?
Luminary
Kia ora, I’m Karen Sewell, visual artist. I graduated from Whitecliffe’s Master of Fine Arts programme in 2016. My practice is based in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland and I am artist in residence at Holy Trinity Cathedral. I work across different media that include sculpture, installation, photography, video, light and sound, creating artworks in unexpected and alternative exhibition spaces such as outdoors, sites of worship and gallery spaces.
St John’s in the City is hosting my multi-media installation Luminary featuring a two-metre spherical object that floats high in the ceiling space, partially concealed by a veil of material illuminated in light. Alongside are two series of my lumen photographic prints, created with dawn light, evoking celestial bodies. An enigmatic soundtrack permeates the space with recordings by NASA’s Voyager spacecraft around our solar system.
I’m inviting viewers to contemplate the mystery and beauty of the universe and experience a liminal encounter with the numinous through the medium of light. Numinous means everything within our realm of experience which cannot be quantified, explained, or contained – the unseen and the unknown. This includes our intuition, our feeling states, our connection to the cosmos, and our sense of the divine. This is a central motivation for my art practice.
I love working in the intersection between art and spiritual experience, in particular liminal or felt experiences of the numinous. I aspire to develop strong artwork that is life-affirming and engages viewers in ways that support human wellbeing and flourishing, with the potential to bring meaningful change.
My faith practices are a huge part of my art practice. This means bringing what I’m deeply passionate about into times of prayer and contemplation, then nurturing the inspiration I receive into my creative process.
Luminary will be hosted at St John’s in the City from 30 July - 7 August. More details about the opening and other events will follow.
Luminary will tour Dunedin, Christchurch and Wellington during July and August. The launch event was held in May at Northart Gallery, Auckland.
NZ Tour www.luminaryvenice.com/events
Northart www.northart.co.nz/exhibitions/gallery-4-5
Luminary I Luminare is also part of the Personal Structures exhibition in Venice. Luminary I Luminare can be seen in Palazzo Bembo, Venice, until 27 November 2022.
https://ecc-italy.eu/exhibitions/2022artbiennial
www.luminaryvenice.com
Art and Faith, a reflection by John Irvine
I have always appreciated and been grateful for the beauty and perfection of nature. It is the embodiment of Gods gift of a perfect and beautiful home for his people. I love the beauty of mountains, lakes, rivers and trees – especially trees.
I was blessed to be gifted with a love for these things and an ability to capture some of this with oil paintings… and what a beautiful country to live in with endless vistas of majesty and beauty to be used as inspiration and subject matter.
Nowadays we photograph everything and anything, but this has only been a widely available tool for about 160 years. Prior to that all our depictions of people and places were done by artists, both painters and sculptors. I still marvel at the God-given talent that enabled Michelangelo to extract exquisite beauty and drama from marble or the wonderful, useful information made available in the landscapes and seascapes painted by the famous artists we know and appreciate – Gainsborough, Turner, Da Vinci, Vermeer, Van Dyke et al. It is a huge list and so many of the old masters also painted their interpretations of myths, legends and history, including Bible stories. Obviously these can only be someone’s interpretation but many are moving and thought provoking.
Pre-reformation art doesn’t do much for my faith journey as I don’t consider it to be ‘photographic’ or that it could possibly be representative of real events or people….too many halos and too much ‘people worship’ !!!
I am still moved by the beautiful tapestry of the Last Supper at the front of the church on the righthand side. The story of how it was gifted to us by an elderly refugee is special. Stained glass windows are also uplifting as they fill holy buildings with colourful and thought provoking images.
I do find the presentation and depiction of the power, beauty and grandeur of creation using art is uplifting and helpful to me on my faith journey. I thanks God for His gifts to me of appreciation, eyesight and a love of and talent for art.
John Irvine, Elder Emeritus and all-round nice guy, married to Jinny.