Seen&Unseen: Life is more important than art

I've just started writing for Seen&Unseen, which aims to make Christian faith better understood in public, displaying the creative, imaginative, culture-shaping power of the Christian gospel.

In my first article I review the themes of recent art exhibitions tackling life’s big questions and the roles creators take. Part of my article is based on a paper I presented at The Art of Creation, a conference held at Kings College London and organised through the National Gallery’s Interfaith Sacred Art Forum, which brought together speakers from a wide range of disciplines to explore the intersection of art, theology, and ecology: 

"The conference was part of a year-long series of reflections on three paintings from the National Gallery’s Collection – Claude Monet’s Flood Waters, Vincent Van Gogh’s Long Grass with Butterflies, and Rachel Ruysch’s Flowers in a Vase - which raise ecological concerns. The papers exploring aspects of these paintings drew on an eclectic, yet fascinating, range of sources including: Maori beliefs; the Jewish and Christian scriptures; South African poetry; the Nouvelle Theologie; the theology of resonance; the writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Marilynne Robinson; and a range of related artworks including the work of Barnett Newman and Regan O’Callaghan. The conference initiated a dialogue regarding ways in which art and faith together can help us make reparative connections in a fragile world and its approaches suggest ways of engaging with the big issues that artists and curators are exploring."

In the article I suggest that these "ways of relating art, creation and faith suggest one approach to engaging with the big issues that artists and curators are exploring and which faith communities, including the Church, have explored throughout the history of humanity."

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Bruce Cockburn - To Keep The World We Know.