Abstract
Resulting from an exhibition and symposium on Feminist Theology and Art, this collection of essays and artwork is a feast for the eyes. Curated by Megan Clay, it comprises seven articles, each accompanied by beautifully reproduced artworks and illustrations. As Lisa Isherwood points out in her preface, art is a way of unlocking the unconscious, and in the words and images of the contributors, this possibility is explored and applied to their respective attitudes to embodied theology. More than this: the images themselves offer the reader ways of engaging with their own experiences of themselves, and, indeed, of the divine.
While paintings predominate, a range of artistic practices is explored, including textiles, liturgical vestments (Deborah Ireland) and altar cloths (Rachel Noël), as well as dance (Maisie Beth James). The variety of approaches makes this a comprehensive way of engaging with the possibilities of creativity for body theology. Artistic practice is highlighted as a vital way for enabling deeper engagement with lived experience.
The essays offered here are highly personal, and all the more important for that insight into the artistic process and the construction of the self. While highly personal, there is also reflection on methodology that suggests the possibility of creating rather more general and universal ways of engaging with experience. Silvia Martinez Cano, for example, explores in the opening essay how a distinctive methodology emerges out of the conversation between theological and artistic practice. Religious experience and aesthetic experience are, she contends, intimately entwined. At the same time, Martinez Cano is at pains to stress the necessity of grappling with the depths of the personal for such an endeavour (see p. 22).
In creating a feminist aesthetic, the historic exclusion of women from the artistic mainstream is not ignored. Notably, Christine Kinsey reflects on the example of Artemisia Gentileschi in order to explore both the exclusion of women from the canon of Western art, and the way in which personal experience has the power to shape what and how one paints. Artemisia is a fine example, whose work is now being revisited and celebrated. Her painting of Judith beheading Holofernes, for example, is an example of how the pain of the artist’s own rape is felt in a disturbing picture where the abused overcomes their abuse and abuser in a violent and cathartic depiction of revenge.
As might be expected in a volume coming out of embodied theology, nature and the natural are powerfully present. So Deborah Ireland reflects on her process through a number of paintings that highlight the location of faith in the natural world. In similar vein, Heike Knops in her drawing ‘Half Woman’ draws upon the location of the self in the nexus of past, present and future, where grey hairs stand as reminders of the transience of life.
For this reviewer, the most affecting images are those which explicitly play with iconic depictions of theological stories and doctrines. Particular images that caught my imagination were Megan Clay’s ‘Flesh Becomes Word’ (p. 50), which comprises a red outline of a cruciform woman, her body inscribed with common words of approbation directed at the female body and female experience. Reminded of the crucified Christ, this image opens up thoughts about what, exactly, we must be saved from. Clay’s ‘Cosmic Emergence’ was similarly affecting here, the image of a dancing woman, transforms its earlier presentation. In the first depiction, words of criticism surround a dancing figure. The transformed image suggests that liberation must be political, but that it also transcends the human and connects us to the heart of the cosmos too.
This is a beautiful and thought-provoking book that acts as a timely reminder of the creativity of feminist theology. The threat to the arts from a higher education sector that sees all through the imperatives of the market has led, as Christine Kinsey says, to the closure of arts college and undervaluing of creativity for its own sake. If anything provides a theological imperative for saving the arts in order that the flourishing life be promoted, this glorious book is it.