Lent 11: living portraits.

Recently, I came across the work of artist Jamie Poole over at the Colossal art blog. Poole constructs beautiful and haunting portraits out of deconstructed poems. As a lover of both poetry and art, you can imagine that I immediately fell in love with his work. You can see more of his incredible artwork at his blog.

I think part of why I find this work with word and image so compelling is because it seems to reflect on the question,"what are we made of?" By constructing images with scraps of poetry and love letters, Poole creates figures that are literally shaped with words. These portraits invite the viewer to reflect on what raw materials forge our own living portraits  If you could create a portrait to reflect who you really are out of anything, what would you choose?  At our core, are we more than cells, skin and bones? What words, images, experiences, relationships, and memories make us who we are?

For me these pieces of art are, in their own way, reflecting on the same questions Christians are trying to answer when we participate in liturgies that employ the images of ash and dust during Lent. We, too, are asking what we are made of, and searching for who we are.

During lent we are entering a time of artistry that involves both remembering and re-membering. To remember, we look back into our tradition and reflect on the ground  from which we come-- the soil that grew us. Yet, we are also re-membering, creatively constructing new self-portraits. With God's help we hope to shred up the old and reassemble the pieces into something fresh and strange and beautiful; we seek to put ourselves together again, not to be merely restored, but to be transformed. We seek to become new.