Exhibition released in March 2016
Dear Flossie,
It was good to see you are arranging several exhibitions and using your art to take people into the deeper place of their inner life. I hope they all go well and that many people connect with what you are offering them. It has been quite busy here and will continue until after Easter – then a few days to rest! I hope all the family are well and yourself included. We will be able to enjoy Easter as Autumn shows its true colours here.
Warm wishes.
Lorraine
Dear Calvin,
Wow! I have been so glad to be inspired by your writings and emails over these many years. Thank yo so much for your encouraging words today! The ice is quite thin where I stand. And this is fore-mostly from the Christians! The others – if interested – in my type of art practice do not credit me with ‘spirituality’! Still, I continue to play to a small audience. Just heard again in church as it is Palm Sunday, that Jesus ‘made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant’. Being a ZERO is still hard for me as it eats at one’s self-confidence (on a good day I really know that is not what Jesus was referring to here). Feeling at least ‘useful’ is integral to being an artist yet ‘being worth nothing’ in a broad sense is what an artist fears most. At this stage in my professional life, I know even less why I am doing art but it feels important to be creating it – all the same. I am so glad it is important to you, Calvin, and to a handful of others. Your response is one of those ‘good surprises’ you hope for me. So appreciated! Could I have your permission to use your feed-back and the reply it generated on my blog (http://myblog.flossiepeitsch.com/tag/artists-life/) which is soon to feature this exhibition in bit-sized bits for the public? With your name? I wish you good surprises too! Nicely put! A fellow worker in the kingdom,
Flossie
On Sun, Mar 20, 2016 at 6:21 AM,
Calvin Seerveld wrote:
Dear Flossie,
I just received and read through your catalogue—extraordinary! The words and images are thoroughly you, in your deepest heart, given trenchant expression that with the artwork is deeply compelling. Congratulations are carrying through, with accessible talk, the fact of God’s creational daily reality which can afford a gracious opening to the saving truth. Thank you for keeping me up to date on your mission in the artworld. Your artwork witness is a great encouragement to me.
God bless you with good surprises!
Cal
Hi Flossie,
Have just read all your materials. It looks fantastic. I really like the workshops, alternate commentaries, questioning where and how we shaped creatively…and your sculptural questions & their artistic manifestation. I am really impressed. I am so sorry I can’t be there to participate. Yeah that ad for weiwei & Warhol drives me nuts. Good on you for subversion!
Cheers & hugs
Wendy Suiter
Art has an alarming capacity to unearth personal bias and prejudice. Like a mole it digs into the psychological constructions of the world we experience and evokes reflective material. The Word Bites preceding clearly demonstrate this encounter. When looking at Flossie’s texts, it is not so much a question of what we see; rather, it is a question of what these texts do to us. If, after wandering through her representations of her experience of the world, it is concluded that the texts have done nothing to the observer; even then, it is the case that they have done something.
Hans- Georg Gadamer (1911-2002) the German writer on the subject of hermeneutics, dedicated his life to understanding human interpretive processes. We belong to our world via the way we interpret our world. We connect ourselves to our world via texts -literary texts, visual texts and human texts. All have narratives at their core which have a much more powerful impact upon our sense of belonging than ‘objective truth’. Indeed, we ourselves are ‘living texts’. Sometimes we are disconnected from our world by the way we are understood and interpreted by others. We find we no longer ‘fit’. The end result is marginalisation and alienation. We are all asylum seekers searching for a sanctuary
Bite 13 by FP: In need of a small sanctuary to find the milk of human kindness and maybe even the divine, often leads one to a wordy wash that confuses -rather than clarifies.
Cardboard wood 30cmL x 30cmW x 30cmH $4,300
Bite 13 by NN: The Incarnation tells the story that God became human, thriving inside Mary’s nourishing and life-giving womb. Men could but stand by for nine months and look on. A few years later, the One who was laid in the manger was deemed unacceptable because of his attitude towards women. Therefore, he had to be marginalised. He remains marginalised to the degree that some male religious folk cannot tolerate the idea of ordaining women. In any powerful patriarchal context, the milk of human kindness flowing from some religious leaders towards women candidates for ordination quickly sours, curdles and becomes a form of religious mastitis. Any breast feeding association will recommend that if you think you have mastitis then you should seek treatment immediately.
Bite 12 by FP: Water is used often in the Bible to signify change and new life – for the better. But not every person’s life journey leads across calm, supporting water. It can be dangerous and the vessel found unsatisfactory. This sculpture represents one of those times.
Wood, paint 53cmL x 38cmW x 48cmH $6,700
Bite 12 by NN: According to the Book of Revelation there will be no sea in heaven. In some biblical texts water was deemed chaotic and too dangerous. This suggests there is little future for Noah’s Ark. In the world to come his vessel will certainly be an unsatisfactory form of transportation. However, with Noah’s dedication and ingenuity, wheels could be attached so that the various life forms taking refuge in it can be moved around and distributed throughout the few remaining ecologically appropriate habitats still left standing amongst the mansions of heaven. As a result of town planning in earthly cities, not every creature has had a safe journey across the landscape of calm and supporting waters. Human beings have thrown many overboard. Perhaps this is how the dinosaurs became extinct.
Bite 11 by FP: ‘Let me build a tabernacle for each of us so we need never leave.’ This was a disciple’s idea at the Transfiguration. It was never going to happen, but still, what an idea!
Fabric, wood, string, stones 30cmL x 30cmW x 80cmH $6,000
Bite 11 by NN: Indeed! What an idea! It never did happen. In the meantime, latent anti-Semitism in the heart of Christianity has inspired many to tear down hundreds of synagogues thereby refusing to accept that synagogues, tabernacles and churches can coexist in peace. There have been many moments in Western civilisation when the Church lost sight of the reality that Jesus of Nazareth was a Jewish rabbi, not a Christian. Jesus would have found himself rounded-up and placed in the ghettos and camps.
Bite 10 by FP: Quick Response Codes help a person locate a product and review it before purchasing. They are direct links to a digital world but suppose they could link a person directly to the divine.
Canvas, wood, paper 30cmL x 30cmW x 10cmH $3,000
Bite 10 by NN: Quick Response Codes in the form of simplistic religious slogans displayed on church billboards are sometimes thought essential for attracting a potential ‘conversion-product’ amongst the flow of humanity walking past. Church growth in the modern context appears to depend largely on corporate-type slogans. However, the notion of keeping it simple on a weekly basis does not work in a complex world. Slogans never stand up to the test of an informed understanding of real life. They only ‘work’ when life is as you imagine it should be. Rarely is that the case. People cannot be ‘put in boxes’. Life is not that simple.
Bite 9 by FP: The ‘goods’ covered by the QR Codes are the disposed containers of previous purchases, now recycled as a set of collectables. It is a twist playing on assigned value in contrast to inherent value. However, social acceptance of this process, is unattainable.
Wood, bottles, paper Various $5,700
Bite 9 by NN: The disposition of Jesus of Nazareth towards previously purchased products and second-hand goods, namely the prostitutes and sinners of his day, reveals that both the assigned value and the inherent value he gave them differed greatly from the views of the religious establishment. One such prostitute linked herself directly to the divine by washing his feet with her hair. She did not need an App.
Bite 8 by FP: Often we come to art with our minds made up as to what we will like or tolerate. The same holds true about spirituality. This art invites you to consider these biases as ‘bugs’ to the system.
Satin, cardboard hardware 56cmL x 42cmW x 33cmH $6,700
Bite 8 by NN: The life of Jesus of Nazareth amongst the marginalised and dispossessed illustrates clearly the set of collectables belonging to God. Compassion is the mysterious twist which recycles shattered human beings thrown onto the rubbish dump by formalised religion. Moralism is one ‘bug’ in this system since it lays the foundation for prejudice against those who are different, breeds religious intolerance and divides humanity into those who are ‘right’ and those who are ‘wrong’. Religious dialogue, like political dialogue, can be dominated by these concerns about who is ‘right’ and who is ‘’wrong’. In such a linguistic context, the search for truth becomes an illusion because the main concern is not for truth; rather, the dialogue aims to establish who has the ‘right’ truth and who has the ‘wrong’ truth. Eventually this becomes an issue of verbal power over someone rather than a mutual concern for truth. Sometimes religious wars are conducted in order to settle the argument, but they never succeed in doing so.
Bite 7 by FP: This piece plays with real and imagined proportions, considers global intervention to safely contain ‘God’ as perceived by some people in an elaborate box.
Sislation 30cmL x 30cmW x 30cmH $4,300
Bite 7 by NN: Cultural accretions infusing verbalised expressions of Christianity can easily box-in and trap truth. In the Christian tradition, the One who is confessed to be the Truth has been passed down through history wrapped in words and images. I wonder if he would still recognize himself. It may be the case that, if he were to come again and attempt to correct the linguistic portrayals of himself, rework many of the images found hanging in traditional galleries, edit Hollywood’s celluloid and digital versions of his life, then he could be crucified a second time on the grounds that he was an imposter.
