How to decorate for Christmas?

Yes, it is Christmas time in Australia, as everywhere. Duh. But. It’s not cold here, it’s not winter, the notion of light in the darkness doesn’t hold very well because, well, there’s so little darkness in early summer. Again, duh. But daily, I’m seeing the usual UK inflatable Santas, snowmen, green wreaths with red bows and twinkle lights. Searching on the internet for other warm climate Christmas ideas, I see similar things; Christmas trees, yet decorated with flowers and not baubles, funky Santas with surfboards, twinkle lights in the Caribbean (as ever, for a warm tropical evening). The Christmas message of Jesus, Mary and Joseph? Not a lot to see on that front.

If we ever needed to know, Christmas isn’t the incarnated Christ in a child, it is a presents, drink and food celebration at the end of a the calendar year. People in the northern hemisphere made the season images and they’ve been transported across the planet. Many in the UK have spoken about going with the flow, leaving the message to churches and changing all the celebrations to Winterval. This lets us celebrate light in the dark, cosy families around fires and warm tables. But Summerval doesn’t’ really cut it in the same way.

Me being me, I wanted to join the celebration, but to do a decoration which somehow told the deep message we Christians want to share. I’ve battled this for years in preparation for living here, but came to nothing. It was being here which made me get to the core story. The incarnation is about God getting deeply involved with people, becoming a yowling baby, colluding with humanity to bring the Divine truth. Earth and heaven connected in real time. I started collecting and making stars.

On the front of our lovely new house is an old basketball hoop, long since unused, but still there. It became the holder for my ideas as I reached for my installations box, recently arrived by ship in our container. Here is our Christmas decoration with heaven and earth colluding, stars tangled with the green of earth. I’m not sure what anyone else makes of it, but it cheers us up!

Street Art is almost everywhere

We can’t walk out of home any day without seeing it. Everywhere. Now that’s not true because it isn’t everywhere, but my word it feels like it is. Any surface seems to be fair game; someone’s fence, post boxes, vacant shops, the hoardings of active shops/restaurants/theatres, bus shelters, tram stops, walls in car parks; anywhere. Graffiti. Some of it looks more like artwork than other of it. But one can’t be anywhere in Melbourne without getting used to graffiti. There is no respite. Interesting that I chose the word respite.

As a North American and European fine artist, I’m struggling with a sense of the ‘right’ to have a public space for art. Apparently, this is one of the reasons given for why there is so much graffiti. I’m not used to the concept of a right to public space to do anything but to gather and to walk. In my prior two resident countries, even that is under threat. My experience is that rights to space are conferred by the one who owns or manages the space. Sculptures in public places were commissioned and permitted. They are at risk of public reaction to them, but they don’t go up without some kind of legal arrangement. I have certainly learned in the UK that every bit of land is managed by someone. Perhaps that isn’t just or good, but it is the way it is. It is interesting to me that in a country where space managed and honoured by peoples for tens of thousands of years and unceremoniously taken by settlers now is a country with the sense that there should be a right to any space for public art. It confuses me. So much simply looks like vandalism. I will learn why it seems a good idea, I hope. The rest of my life will include it! Anyway, our ship has arrived. Our personal contents will be with us in a few weeks. Most likely the lorry bringing it will be sporting graffiti :-)

I’ve taken photos and share them below. I have no way to ask the artist’s permission. I’m not sure about that either…

Here’s something about why there is So much Graffiti in Melbourne.

Change and Discipline

Some of you know that I made a personal promise to blog every other week and to send newsletters every other week. When I started the pattern in October 2023, most of you expected that it was all related to the exhibitions. That was never in my mind.

Years before I moved my office desk into my studio, when I had a studio, I used set times to go into it no matter what. Sometimes I had no idea what I would create, but something always happened even if it was just sorting. Being there itself became like a spiritual discipline, like a daily prayer cycle. Whatever my mood, I did it. Time and time again, there were revelations from the artwork, from the thinking, from the praying. When I moved my desk in, the project management informed my artwork and the creativity informed my project management. But the disciplined time became fuzzy and I missed it.

When I started to write weekly to keep you up to date by blog or newsletter, I was delighted to discover that the spiritual discipline had returned. Each week I need to reflect and make sense of things enough to explain them or to clear my mind. Sometimes a personal conversation turns out to be an idea I think others would be helped to know. Like my last post, it could be a personal anger which it may help you to share. Often I have no idea until I start writing, other times I have a plan.

Now, as so much in our life is literally upside down, I’m grateful for this grounding thing. It’s a later post this week because plans are almost impossible when so many things have still to be settled. We’re spotting artwork and earth-care in wonderful surprising places, and they're cheek by jowl next to neglect and graffiti. Trees are plantiful, birdsong amazing. Public transport is fabulous until we realise how dependent we are on borrowing a family car to bring home a week’s groceries or household things we couldn’t ship and need to replace. We’re learning new names for familiar things, new places to access familiar services.

You have probably heard me say that change and death are the only things guaranteed in our lives. I should have remembered our move to our boat in 2007 to recall that a huge amount of change in a short time with no option of going back is stressful. Here we are. Stressed and at the same time, marrow and heart deeply confident that this is the right move for us. I’m grateful for the discipline of this reflective process to be reminded of all the good. It cuts through all the change to life's core.

We are deeply grateful for the care from others and the preparation made by our family. The grandchildren gave us their playroom for a month! As we wait in a settled home for our container I am grateful for the connectedness from this kind of discipline. Not everything is new. I am grateful for love and welcome. I look forward to what my new studio turns out (when my art materials arrive 🙃).

Yes, it's a painful world right now and the US hasn't helped

I was born in the USA. A long time ago. But until I left it, I didn’t see its truth. I lived in the silo of shared thinking, democratic social focused values, going to school with families from financially mobile families, going to church with mostly white neighbours. My boyfriend, unusually, was the black High School football (US Style) Quarterback. Evenso, my silo was quintessential institutional racism, misogyny, patriarchy, all-right-for-some culture. I was part of the some it was all right for. I didn’t see any of that until I grew the power of hindsight/distance sight. When I traveled outside of the borders of the US, I was part of the only 25% who had passports. Now the number is around 20%. I learnt so much, I could never go back. Wimp.

I tell you all of this to help put in context even the idea of Donald Trump’s impending second term as president of the USA. The vast majority of those in the USA only know their own silos of culture. If you live in a farm twenty miles from another, only see the same people at the same stores you can get to in an hour’s drive, read only what that known community tells you, you are likely to form certain similar opinions as others in your silo. Your chance of changing those opinions is limited; it depends on your capacity to risk losing the very community which raised you. If you are a city dweller, stripped out of any fair rents, relying on rogue landlords and having no social security to pay the bills which are raising, you are not going to trust the government to understand your predicament. Why would you believe now? As one of the two countries on the planet with no statutory maternity pay, why would any candidate be believable now? We in the UK have to understand the almost immovable context of the USA, built as it is on oppression, racism, patriot mythology and all-power-to-the-wealthy. The USA enabled Donald Trump. It got what it made.

Yes, and yet. A huge number of people are now very angry. A huge number. Very, very, substantially, hugely angry. Think of that anger as the birth pangs of a new age. The new age is critical. It never arrives easily or smoothly. It requires us to pay attention to the signs and face up to our role as part of the angry energy which looks to reshape, not to exercise revenge. There is no single group to line up for revenge - the whole 250+ years of the greedy culture of the USA since the 1700s has no single perpetrator or agency.

If, like me, you are part of the angry brigade, hurrah. Let’s focus that anger on doing anything possible to help other people understand the context of people who have been so indoctrinated in unjust cultures (like ours), that change to what we can blatantly see as the ‘right thing’ to do is too hard. Let’s focus the anger on energy to be patient. Let’s focus the anger on the single steps we can take each day to help someone see someone else’s point of view. Anger is fabulously excellent when it energizes justice. It’s a holy divine power. It is ours to use.

So how did all the tours start?! was the question...

…which many of you have asked. So it’s time to tell you.

Way back in the late Autumn of 2022, I was talking with a wonderful woman from a gallery in Rugby as I was preparing to move from 1/3 time artist to full time artist. She liked my work enormously and wanted to sell it. But the more she had it and looked at her client list, she realised that my work needed a more specialist home, saying to me, “you really need a spiritual gallery.” I thought, great, thanks, what’s one of those when it’s at home? Then I realised I’d been exhibiting and selling from spiritual galleries most of my adult life whilst being an artist theologian. They’re called Churches. My early artist days, I’d drawn pastel portraits in shopping centres, took commissions and sold from galleries and street and group exhibits. But once I entered the ministry, those commercial outlets didn’t serve the work I was creating and I started to exhibit in churches and to sell my work to theological publishers. The gallery owner was right. Churches.

Gallery size? Cathedrals. Then I thought, I really want to do this with someone. I want the 40% commission I would have given to a gallery to go to a cause about which I have a passion. Then I recalled a wonderful aphorism - ‘you already know who you need to know for your life to grow.’ I looked at who I knew and the Open Table Network kept grabbing my attention. So I contacted dear Kieran. He and I had worked together on the Appreciating Church Project with his case study of St Bride’s Liverpool being published in the book I illustrated. I suggested that we raise money for OTN by having a partnership to place my artwork around Cathedrals and large churches in the UK where there is either an Open Table community in existence or there is a desire for one. He took the idea to the OTN Trustees who liked the idea. Then we started to look for Cathedrals.

My closest cathedral was Coventry, and possibly also my most favourite on the planet, so I visited and found out who to contact. I emailed. One email. The reply was instant - yes, please, and can it be February 2024 for LGBTQ+ history month? I replied, well, yes. Kieran and I were flabbergasted and Coventry opened the doors to all the other Cathedrals and Churches we asked. A few said no, because their congregations or communities "weren’t ready”, but the response was overwhelming. The Open to All tour was planned.

The Open to All tour was so welcomed that we were asked to go to more places than we had time for. So I pulled together another set of artwork which I called the Spirit Justice tour and four more venues were added to the list of eleven we had engaged for Open to All. Along the way, we received a grant from the Westhill Endowment to fund some of the traveling and accommodation expenses and many individual churches have helped with expenses.

At the end of the road, all the easels from Open to All now live at United Church Winchester because they decided that connecting with their community through art was a good way forward for them. We raised nearly £4000 in total for a combination of the Open Table Network and anti racist charities. The signature artworks from Open to All and Spirit Justice now live in permanent public venues where their messages will continue in perpetuity. We have been amazed.

Witness will be witnessing to visitors from around the world

My dear Witness, the signature painting of my website and the signature piece of the Spirit Justice tour, has a new home. At the moment, it has been purchased by the good people of Aberdeen United Reformed Church and rests in a temporary waiting place. The new home is to be St Mary’s Chapel in the OpenSpace Trust.

From the Open Space Trust website: “Welcome to the OpenSpace Trust. The Trust was set up in 2005 and took the present name in 2008. It is a registered charity and a company limited by guarantee.

The vision is to create a vibrant space, in the heart of the City, within the significant heritage of the building (parts dating back 1,000 years) for the people of Aberdeen and visitors to use and enjoy.

The main focus for the OpenSpace Trust at present is to deliver the Mither Kirk Project. Already the Trust has undertaken the archaeological dig and completed the work required to the exterior fabric of the building. The next phase of their work will be construction of the interior to create OpenSpace.”

St Mary’s Chapel is scheduled to be open this month - St Mary’s Chapel. When it is installed, I’ll update you, and it is all quite exciting. The purpose of Witness is to gather people to see what the viewers in the painting see - energy, light, a non-anxious gathering. I’ve written and spoken about it here. It seems a perfect image to gather people from around the world into a non-anxious presence to witness a welcome light together.

No they don't...

Now for some random thoughts. I had a deep conversation with someone this week, where they were looking for hope in their current life by reaching for the “Things happen for a reason” rationale. This is the “this must be good for me, it will all make sense in the long run” rationale. “God has this in His [sic] plan” is often the unspoken root phrase, coming to us from multiple sources over generations/eons. I gently lead you to the title of this blog. No they don’t. Things don’t happen for a reason, they simply happen.

We can see that sometimes there is a line of agency, like a domino set up where if one pushes, the others fall in perfect time. I’ve seen amazing live sculptures of coloured domino-like blocks and it is incredible to watch. The reason they work is that each block is the same shape in a carefully placed relationship to the other blocks, the same room and conditions, and more. That’s not life. Our lives are not neatly shaped blocks in a carefully designed context, 99% the same as the life next to us. Not only did God not design us that way, God has no time for such seamless conformity in our world. Justice and love demand moment by moment interpretation and a behaviour right now which might be different than yesterday and might not be the same as tomorrow.

We can, when we look back, see that the consequence of a Thing Happening was that we learned something momentous. We can see that we changed to be more hopeful or more confident or more aware from that Thing. That’s fabulous. But the Thing wasn’t designed for us for that particular learning. It simply happened. We could have been the agent or the victim in the situation. A Thing caused an action, a response happened, a difficult thought happened, hard words were said, laughter had. Whatever. God’s plan is not a day to day agenda which we are simply actors on God’s strings. We’re created for wisdom and love and analysis and relationship. We’re made to look deeply at or into the Thing, to see what is happening and to use our gut to decide what to do – this time.  We may have experience to bear on it and help us to move in it and celebrate the learning.

Mostly, the Things which happen to us are beyond our control.  Some other person decided something rational or not, some institution has become unworkable, some situation blew out of all proportion and gathered us in.  Knowing this, we can refine how we respond to the Thing by focussing on only that which we can do. I’ve written about not feeling in control before.  

But what about tomorrow? Can we hope? Will life ever be simple? No, life will never be simple. That’s just how it is. We humans are complex, the life around us is not simple, the systems around us are not neat. We can hope that everything will be kind and more loving and we can behave as if it already is.  We can chose to see Things as simply things, not things brought to teach us some divine lesson. They happen. Our reaction to them is where we gain our lives and our hope and our courage.

Things don’t happen for a reason. They happen. We respond in hope and courage.

 The picture below is a sermon preparation, with drawings interpreting the scripture readings. My summary was that we are held in love to be as angry or loving as we like. We are not operated like robots; we are held, lovingly, as we are intensely, complexly and randomly human.