Tag: botanical prints

Roundup: Site-specific dance in sanctuary, the Feast of Creation, botanical portraits of place, and more

Victoria Emily JonesLeave a comment

DANCE: “Seraphim” (2026), choreographed by Lindsey Hanson: This is one of the most unique dances for film that I’ve seen. It’s absolutely mesmerizing! Filmed in Dimnent Memorial Chapel in Holland, Michigan, with a bird’s eye view camera, “Seraphim” features eight female dancers who utilize the space’s pews and at times appear to be swimming in water or floating in zero gravity. They curl and climb and slide and propel. I love the illusion of them ascending and descending a ladder using the bench ends—a reference to the ladder in Jacob’s vision, linking heaven and earth. (Reminds me of the angels on the limestone facade of Bath Abbey in the UK!) In part because of the work’s title, I imagine the dancers as the invisible spiritual presences that move about the church, quietly ministering.

“Seraphim” is the second of four new works created this year as part of the Sanctuary Project, funded by the Creative Arts Collective for Christian Life and Faith. The third work, “Gethsemane,” will be performed for a live audience, who will watch from the stage, on September 5 at the W83 Ministry Center Sanctuary at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City; free reservations are open! Debuting in 2021, SANCTUARY is a site-specific dance made for Redeemer, to activate the architecture of the church’s worship space, and choreographer and director Lindsey Hanson has expanded the concept into a continuing body of work.

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POEM: “Lord of Light and Dark” by Haley Hodges Schmid, Reformed Journal: Haley Hodges Schmid is a sonically driven poet, and that shows in this gorgeous poem published last month, a prayer with internal rhyme, consonance, a verbified noun, and other language play. It’s about “holy darkening,” says Schmid, whose debut poetry collection, Eros Rex, was released earlier this year by Orison Books. She seeks to recover positive imagery of darkness, and so expand our metaphorical associations. I’m reminded of other poets who have similarly explored the biblical paradox of the light and darkness of God, including John Milton (“Dark with excessive bright thy skirts appear,” he writes in Paradise Lost) and Meister Eckhart via Jon M. Sweeney and Mark S. Burrows: “You are the One who is in-yet-beyond / the many, Light burning in darkness // and Darkness shining beyond light” (from Meister Eckhart’s Book of the Heart). There are a handful of contemporary hymns and worship songs that do the same.

“Lord of Light and Dark” was born out of a week-long residency on poetry and prayer that Schmid participated in in Asheville, North Carolina, led by Marie Howe, who had the group write collects, a short, structured prayer form used in Anglican worship.

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ARTICLES:

>> “A feast day for the whole church,” an interview with Kimberly Belcher, by Steve Thorngate, Christian Century: “This spring, the Consultation on Common Texts published an update to the Revised Common Lectionary: It added the Feast of Creation in Christ on September 1, offering biblical texts and other materials for use starting with the current church year. It’s a milestone in a decades-long ecumenical process.” Steve Thorngate talks with liturgical theologian Kimberly Belcher, who participated in the Assisi meetings in 2024–25, about this feast day that has only recently developed in the West but that has been celebrated in the East for more than five hundred years as the Feast of the Indiction. Belcher describes what’s behind the full name, how a feast day is distinct from a world day of prayer, the challenges and gifts of ecumenism, creation as revelation, and more.

Vooys, Mary Haasdyk_Feast of Creation in Christ
Illustration by Mary Haasdyk Vooys for The Christian Century‘s September 2026 cover story on the Feast of Creation in Christ, a new addition to the official liturgical calendars of many Western churches

I love the illustration Mary Haasdyk Vooys made for this article, which is used on the magazine’s cover. It shows Christ as Creator, holding a drafting compass and surrounded by diverse animals.

>> “Hillary Waters Fayle Creates ‘Portraits of Place’ from Seeds, Foliage, and Petals” by Kate Mothes, Colossal: Portraits of Place is an ongoing series of botanical artworks by Hillary Waters Fayle that pay tribute to the land and our relationship with it. The artist collects botanical material from a designated place, dries and preserves it, arranges it into an intricate, mandala-like pattern, and then uses that to create a cyanotype. Many of these she does on commission for people who want to commemorate a piece of land that is special to them.

“Penland Pop” by Hillary Waters Fayle
Penland Pop by Hillary Waters Fayle

I urge you to explore the artist’s website, which contains many more photos plus other extraordinary projects, including embroidered leaves and lacelike leafcuts: https://www.hillarywfayle.com/.

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WORSHIP RESOURCES: Creation Collection from Reformed Worship: ReformedWorship.org has compiled numerous resources on the theme of creation—worship services, songs, prayers, litanies, a Psalms-based reader’s theater, sermon series, stories, and more.

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SONG: “Die Himmel erzählen die Ehre Gottes” (The Heavens Declare the Glory of God) by Heinrich Schütz: This motet from 1648 is a setting of Psalm 19:1–6. It’s performed here by VOCES8 in the Christuskirche in Recklinghausen, Germany.

Thorns and resurrection with Paul van Dongen

Victoria Emily JonesLeave a comment

Thistles, seaweed, ivy, and other plants and flowers appear often in the work of Dutch artist Paul van Dongen [previously], whose creative output includes a series of etchings titled Crown of Thorns. Made in 2004–5, shortly after his return to the Christian faith, each of these pieces portrays a ring of twining briars that evoke the headpiece forced mockingly on Jesus prior to his execution.

Dongen, Paul van_Crown of Thorns (2)
Paul van Dongen (Dutch, 1958–), Crown of Thorns (2), 2004. Etching, 25 × 37 cm. All photos courtesy of artist.
Dongen, Paul van_Crown of Thorns (3)
Paul van Dongen (Dutch, 1958–), Crown of Thorns (3), 2004. Etching, 28 × 40 cm.
Dongen, Paul van_Crown of Thorns (4)
Paul van Dongen (Dutch, 1958–), Crown of Thorns (4), 2004. Etching, 25 × 37 cm.
Dongen, Paul van_Crown of Thorns (5)
Paul van Dongen (Dutch, 1958–), Crown of Thorns (5), 2005. Etching, 25 × 37 cm.

“I think all nature is not just botanical,” the artist told me in an email when I inquired about the series. “It’s also a sign—a signal, if you please—of something or Someone supernatural.” Some items found in nature, like these thorn branches, even have a Christological association, thorns having been an instrument of Christ’s passion.

Etching is a printmaking process in which a metal plate (in van Dongen’s case, zinc) is first coated in an acid-resistant ground of wax. The artist then draws a picture or design into the plate with an etching needle, exposing the bare metal so that when the plate is dipped into an acid bath, the acid bites into the exposed areas to create recesses that can retain ink. Next the artist removes the wax ground, inks the plate (letting the ink settle into the etched grooves), wipes clean the surface, and finally rolls the plate through a press with a sheet of paper, to which the reverse image adheres. Voila!

Van Dongen collects organic materials from his surroundings in Tilburg, bringing them back to his studio. His drawings on the plate are done directly from life, with no sketches beforehand or photographs. “Everything has to be present before me,” he says.

For his Crown of Thorns etchings, he gathered thorny twigs and branches from bramble bushes and bent and wove them into circular forms—“a painful job”! One of these crowns he keeps on the wall of his studio, next to a seventeenth- or eighteenth-century Portuguese corpus (body of Christ) that his aunt gifted to him.

Paul van Dongen studio with crown of thorns

Continuous in some ways with this somber series and yet visually and thematically distinct is van Dongen’s vibrant Verrijzenis (Resurrection) etching, made with colored inks and, using a process of his own making, printed watercolor. I and the Daily Prayer Project team chose this image for the cover of our Easter 2021 periodical, which is available for purchase in print or digital format. (As a side note, I contributed a written piece to this edition, “Praying with the Eyes.”)

van Dongen, Paul_Resurrection
Paul van Dongen (Dutch, 1958–), Verrijzenis (Resurrection), 2006. Watercolor etching, 70 × 33 cm.

I appreciate how van Dongen finds a unique way into the subject of Jesus’s resurrection, taking a nonfigural, conceptual approach that invites contemplation. His etching shows a thorny stem with a few withered shoots bisecting a crown of thorns, breaking it in two, evoking the breaking of Jesus’s body on the cross and, moreover, the breaking of the curse of sin and death, of which thorns are a symbol (Gen. 3:17–19). Consider, too, the covenant of the pieces that God made with Abraham (Gen. 15:1–15), wherein God, manifest as fire, passed between the animal sacrifices Abraham had cut in half, ratifying the promise of a land flowing with milk and honey for all his descendants.

The spherical forms in the background are skulls, an allusion to human mortality and to Golgotha, the “Place of the Skull.” (Van Dongen has worked with this vanitas motif par excellence several times, and even participated in the Skull Show at the ACEC in Apeldoorn in 2019–20; see, e.g., here and here.) But the skulls are dissolving. They and the other organic matter are rendered in red, yellow, green, blue, violet—colors of the rainbow, that ancient sign of God’s promise. The brokenness of creation is being transformed into new life, and even the orientation of the artwork invites us into that “upward call of God in Christ Jesus” (Phil. 3:14), its strong verticality lifting our eyes in a rising motion.

“For me there is no fundamental difference between my explicitly religious works and my more profane, earthly works of art,” van Dongen says. “Nature with its cycle of growing, flowering, dying, and sprouting out again is symbolic to me of Christ and his resurrection. And the other way around.”

Each of the etchings on this page, excluding Resurrection, is from an edition of 15. There are still a few impressions left; contact the artist using the contact form on his website, www.paulvandongen.com, if you wish to inquire about a purchase. Follow him on Instagram @paulvan.dongen.