Creative edges

By Emilie Bouvier

Two weeks ago I found myself in front of a beautiful art piece on the banks of the Wenatchee River in Washington state. I arrived at the Grunewald Guild just hours earlier for a week of teaching an art workshop on photography and spirituality.

I’ve heard pastors comment before that they sometimes find themselves preaching the sermon they themselves most need to hear. I find that is often true for me with my art practice. At least I know most certainly that spending a week interweaving some of my touchstone photography practices with justice-rooted reflection, spiritual grounding, and community-centered creativity was definitely what my spirit most needed.

“Practicing art in community can be powerful.”

Perhaps this is why this sculpture by the river captivated me as I arrived. The piece is formed from four trees. Cut as dead standing, they had then been steamed, power washed, and trimmed, highlighting smooth contours and remaining branches, their simplified intricacies standing starkly out from the dense green of the forest surrounding them. A metal band forms a circle around these pillar trees, with a couple of benches underneath.

Titled “Finesterre,” the piece is designed as a contemplative space, built from a sketch done by Grunewald Guild co-founder Richard Caemmerer. It is a piece that embodies art holding a sacred space for community to gather and creativity to flourish, with branches and bands outlining a place for longing and belonging in a tall stand of ponderosa pines along the Wenatchee river.

 

THE GRUNEWALD GUILD WAS a place that was new to me, though its landscape felt very familiar, just on the other side of a north cascade mountain ridge from Holden Village. The two are sister retreat centers in a way, with parallel values in community, simplicity, and spirituality. The Grunewald Guild has a unique mission, though, of being a small community for artists to create together.

Practicing art in community can be powerful. Creating and sharing art is rarely an isolated experience – even if one’s practice is mostly individual, like mine – as an art piece made and shared opens a space for connection and participation with others. Art shares through impressions and expression in shape, pattern, texture, and colors. It’s hard with such a medium to tell others exactly what to think or feel — yet these images and imprints open space for another to reflect and journey there.

“Creating and sharing art is rarely an isolated experience.”

There’s something sacred about this kind of exchange, I think – how in making and sharing art we can hold space for one another. And in our exploration, the creativity, joy, play, sorrow, connection can become “thin spaces”; we meet the holy one at those edges.

As I stayed up late prepping for class the next day – cutting photographic paper, prepping collage canvasses, laying out class materials, and looking over the readings – I found myself excited and curious about what would emerge. This to me is a part of the spiritual discipline – entering the creativity, community, and process of artmaking, trusting that God will show up.

Whatever creativity looks like for you these days, from art-based play to inspiring conversation and beyond, I hope the joyful spark of creative experience is one where you can encounter the stirring of the Spirit in your own and others’ experience and imagination.

For me, I’m excited to continue to keep finding windows of creating, reflecting, and sharing through artmaking as a part of my vocational life that keeps me grounded and connects me in community. I’m especially excited to share my new art workings at the Minnesota State Fair as the featured artist in the Fine Arts Building on Sunday, September 3 – so if your own spirit is sparked by conversations about art and faith, you can find me there. (And then be sure to support Salem Lutheran by visiting its State Fair booth and getting a Swedish egg coffee or meatballs and mashed potatoes afterward!)