Things New & Old

In Matthew 13:52, Jesus compares a teacher of the Kingdom of God to a house owner “who brings forth out of his treasure, things new and old.” The same could be said of artists who create pieces from whatever interesting objects they find and assemble together.

All the traditional “ingredients” for collage-making, like newspaper, book, and magazine clippings, found their way into From Babel to Wittgenstein, Feeding 5,000, and East of Eden. For Seville Street Madonna, I used dried flowers and shredded sandpaper. The Sower and the Seed contains a clay bird sculpture and harvested wheat from the field in front of my Cyprus home. The Way of the Cross is made of pebbles from a nearby beach. Talk about re-cycling--even my paint-smeared cardboard easels found a place in the collages, The Transfiguration and Psalm 148!

Mixed Media Artist Barry Krammes showed me how to use “things new and old” to assemble free-standing, semi-sculptural objects at a recent Glen Workshop, sponsored by the sacred arts journal, IMAGE.  Putting the Jesus Loves Me box together turned into an exercise in personal archaeology, as I dug out old family photo albums and art books in search of images to decorate an old cedar Bible box, rescued from a charity shop. (A Child is Born was made from a cigar box!)

Looking over my three assembled pieces, you may well think I haven't really gotten “out of the box," when it comes to this kind of art-making, but in a world, overwhelmed by unwanted and discarded objects, the possibilities for redeeming lost things in creative ways are endless!