Monday, July 27, 2009

A feast of images.

In August St John's will host an Exhibition of paintings by one of our members for a week, and an exhibition of marvellous photographs of people drawn from several USPG exhibitions of recent years. The light is so good in church when it's not cloudy, and the tranquil atmosphere makes it a great place to view pictures. I am preparing text material to accompany the photos. The artist, Keith Hall will be hanging his own pictures - all to be sold, proceeds to charity of the buyer's choice.

After yesterday's morning services, during afternoon and evening, I designed some publicity material for the painting exhibition, and ran up a promotional page on the Parish website to whet artistic appetites. I was pleased with the material I produced, and for once without a technical hitch. It gave me such a buzz, and cheered me up following my disconcerting arrival home last night, and failure to secure my sister's re-connection. Despite getting off to sleep all right, I awoke after a couple of hours, and lay awake for another couple of hours, my mind buzzing with thoughts to compose into a letter for the CEO of TalkTalk. The letter took me two hours to compose when I finally got around to it during the morning. No wonder I feel tired today.

This evening Clare showed me the website of an artistic project in which Jane, a long standing friend of ours is a key participant. She's a contemporary dancer and Steiner school teacher, with a wonderful spiritual eye for the mystery and beauty of life. I was much taken by what I saw and read on the website, describing a series of events involving a real physical art installation that embraced light, music movement, puppetry dance, and active participation by audiences whether children or adults. It's an original take on the idea of multimedia events, but without overwhelming electronics or 'virtual realities' attempting to stimulate or overwhelm the imagination. Rather, their projects use the senses in a way that frees the imagination to play freely - a gentle enchantment and initiation into the world of wonder.

Take a look at this - the
Dome d'Ombre website. Looking at it, I was struck that there are some ideas here which would work wonderfully in a meditative liturgical celebration. Then I realised that two of the events described were located in churches taking advantage of unique places to awaken participants. How I'd love to see something like this going on at St John's, already a feast of visual beauty, so easily taken for granted. The freshness of an artists contemplative eye would unlock new vistas on to the Good News for our time.

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