LSC explores ways of personal creative expression through our gallery room displays of artists images and writing.
This space is part of our Creative Spirit focus, and our Arts and Spirituality Special Interest Area. Visit our Gallery rooms to relax and enjoy images and poetry submitted by artists known to us in response to different events. You can enter the Gallery rooms here: “A Beginning” , “Lockdown” and “Holy Island”.
You can move through the images by using the arrows on the right and left of each image. The images will also change automatically, so you might like to sit back and enjoy the images, perhaps with a cuppa or some music.
If you’d like to make more of your viewing time, you might find it helpful to write about any thoughts, feelings, memories that came to you while looking at the images, and see where that takes you.
A Beginning
Jill Tattersall
The eight artists here are known to us. Making their work connects them in some way to life, with or without belonging to any particular religion. This connection with self, nature, others, and for some, life’s source, is a way of understanding spirituality.
Jill Tattersall gives us this commentary on her work – Reflections by Jill Tattersall. Visiting the websites of the artists will give you a sense of the inspiration for their work.
Some of the artists in “A Beginning” make a living from their work, others made work for the first time during lock down. Some discovered their creative gift as something of a surprise, others have studied art in more formal settings.
Lockdown Room
Georgia Wells Atkins Smith
We asked each artist to send us images made during lock down, and also written reflections that connect with their experience of lock down in some way. They have produced a powerful and tender variety of works and perspectives, for which we are very grateful.
It has been our hope from the outset that visitors to this room “Lockdown” might see something of themselves in this exhibition of work. Connecting with the images and stories of others is a good way of realising we are not alone, and can point to new perspectives that enhance our own.
The lock downs have had a whole range of effects on us, even if we consider ourselves to have had a relatively easy time of things. Diana Butler-Bass describes these effects as “Dislocations”, and goes on to describe four forms:
• Temporal (what day is it?)
• Historical (what we knew and trusted has disappeared)
• Physical (Living in cyber space/zoom and missing human contact)
• Relational (missing daily belonging to community)
Her thoughts, and the thoughts of other writers, can be found in our Summer 2021 newsletter:
https://www.livingspirit.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021_summer_newsletter.pdf
We add a room to the Gallery about once a year. We are currently collecting images and poetry made in response to the recent lockdowns in the UK and are likely to call the room Emergence. If you are an artist or wordsmith, and would like to submit work for inclusion in this, or a future room, please email Linda Courage at Linda.courage60@gmail.com for information about emerging themes.
