ImageUpdate 2014 Top Ten

'ImageUpdate select an annual Top Ten list from the over one hundred books, films, albums, visual art collections, and even television shows shared in the e-newsletter each year. ImageUpdate strives to direct readers attention to new and emerging artists.

Holy Heathen Rhapsody by Pattiann Rogers

Its impossible not to feel reverence when you read Holy Heathen Rhapsody, Pattiann Rogers latest collection. Rogers poems are as variegated as the world they witness, but still controlled, graceful with their details.

Arts & Entertainments by Christopher Beha

Arts & Entertainments is a charming, composed work that, in its best moments, recalls Vonnegut and Kafka. Beha demonstrates the consequences of godless men playing God.

My Brightest Diamond: This Is My Hand

Shara Worden offers herself on this album like wine pouring out to thee, for thee, and in doing so her persona possesses the same astronomical dimensions as any pop stars, but the direction of her work is toward gifting her listeners rather than building an image upon their devotion.

Make Me a Mother by Susanne Antonetta

Antonetta's adoption of a five-month-old Korean boy named Jin is set in the larger context of her dysfunctional family history including the challenges and joys of balancing nurture for her young son and the obligation of taking care of aging parents.

Trying to Get a Sense of Scale by Tim Lowly

This handsomely-printed art book, produced in conjunction with an exhibition of paintings by artist Tim Lowly, not only chronicles a large body of work by a distinguished practitioner, but serves as a profound, poignant journey into the meaning of life, love, identity, and beauty.

I Watched You Disappear by Anya Silver

In I Watched You Disappear, we move with Anya Krugovoy Silver as she touches and wonders the world in her poems: the pain of cancer, heft of ripe fruit, beauty of her sons legs, the heart / like a shattered peony, / musky petal after petal / unpeeling, pealing.

Tailings by Kaethe Schwehn

When she was just twenty-two, Kaethe Schwehn decided to spend the better part of a year at a remote retreat center in the Cascade Mountains known as Holden Village. What makes Tailings, Schwehn's account of this year, so compelling is a trick only the best memoirs can pull off: the doubleness of telling a story from the past through the mind of a gifted writer in the present.

The Soil & the Sun: Meridian

The Soil & the Sun is not shy about variety, nor creating bold, artful confusions of sounds. Neither are they shy about their intentions with the record, telling Paste, Meridian is about life and death, mystery, love, selfishness, God, technocracy, sorrow, the end of the world, and the fate of mankind.

The Red List by Stephen Cushman

Stephen Cushman's The Red List (another name for the Endangered Species List) dives boldly into the modern worlds wide-ranging forms of endangerment. Cushman's journey through 21st century hyper-connection leads reader and speaker through a complex landscape fragmented by anxiety, grief, and uncertainty.

Fourth of July Creek by Smith Henderson

Social work lit utilizes a public servant as protagonist, a police officer for example or in Henderson's book, a lonely social worker in rural Montana called Pete Snow. Snow spends his days helping broke-down families while his own family has been thrashed and tossed to the wind.

Image donors have built a formerly scrappy upstart organization into a resourceful community where world-class art can be showcased and fostered. And helpful, informative services like ImageUpdate can be provided for free.'

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My Brightest Diamond - Be Brave.

Where to find me at Greenbelt!

I will be on commission4mission's market stall at this year's Greenbelt Festival. The stall has been organised for us by Harvey Bradley, who will be showing ceramics and paintings at the stall.

Harvey's work will be supplemented by a selection of original work from Hayley Bowen, Ally Clarke, Elizabeth Duncan Meyer, Jonathan Evens, Mark Lewis, Caroline Richardson, Joy Rousell Stone, Henry Shelton and Peter Webb.

Additionally, we will have cards, jewellery, meditations, notebooks and t-shirts produced by our artists for sale, as well as information about our work on commissions, exhibitions, events and publications.

The Secret Chord, my co-authored book with Peter Banks, will be on sale in the Greenbelt Bookshop.

Greenbelt is 40 years old in 2013. The thread that has run throughout its 40 consecutive festivals is that the arts, faith and justice make for a heady mix of creativity and challenge.

As for many people, it has been a significant space for me; somewhere that has consistently provided new perspectives, information and contacts across the arenas of the arts, faith and justice. I have been challenged and encouraged in my faith as a result and that thinking has informed many aspects of my ministry. Under Stewart Henderson's editorship, the Greenbelt magazine Strait was one of the first places where my writing was published and, again, was a real encouragement to me.  

Do come to see us on the commission4mission stall, if you will be at Greenbelt this year.

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After The Fire - Carry Me Home.

Greenbelt diary (5)

Adrienne Chaplin had a go at defining art in her session exploring why we should bother with art. She did acknowledge the difficulties of definitions but suggested that what artists do is to make sense of the world as it appears and feels to us. So that good art teaches us to see, hear, sense and feel better; articulates the way we experience life as felt. Or, perhaps, as Richard Harries puts it in his introduction to Forms of Transcendence: The Art of Roger Wagner (a book I bought at the Festival and read in the queue for The Rising) "every work of art is a deeply felt response to life seen in a particular way."

The most interesting idea which Chaplin posited was that of the importance of touch. Touch, she suggested, is the foundation of the senses. Touch is the first and last sense for us in birth and death, sensations via our skin cannot be avoided or eradicated, and touch is the basis of many lingual metaphors such as tough, smooth, prickly, warm etc.

I saw the Cloud of Witness installation and Gethsemene data projection but wasn't impressed or moved by either. I enjoyed Meryl Doney's guided tour of the Visionaries exhibition where I caught up with Martin Wilson and heard a little about the photographic project he had worked on at this year's Festival to be shown at next years.

Martyn Joseph conversed and performed with three emerging and engaging artists in The Rising and then with poet and lyricist Stewart Henderson. Humourous and profound by turn and in tandem, this was a performance littered with lingual brilliance. At the end they took questions from the audience which led both to state why Greenbelt is so important to them. As for many who go, the combination of friendships, art, questions, and challenge make it 'church' for them (for a similar statement from a punter, click here for a post by Steve Lawson).

While waiting for Athlete I made what for me this year was a rare foray over to the Performance Cafe but was rewarded by a short but sweet set from Sister Jones. Their folk/r&b style was fused with gospel lyricism to great effect and in a seemingly effortless fashion.

Athlete played a great gig but are in need of some U2-style reinvention. The new album, Black Swan, has more light and shade than Beyond the Neighbourhood but both are locked into the anthemic template of the excellent Tourist without tapping into the originality of Vehicles and Animals. Maybe they need to take their own advice and make some magical mistakes. Despite this, they sent me home on a high with the sense that it will be alright and that hope is never light years away.

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Athlete - Black Swan Song.