Unit 6 Faith and Creative Practice
Unit Overview:
- Watch the video “Journeying into the Unknown” (5 mins)
- Read excerpt from Fujimura’s Culture Care (30 mins)
- Consider how you see your artistic practice contributing to care of culture, include reflections in next week’s blog post.
- Mini Process Project Part III: Push One Further
“The opposite of faith is not doubt; the opposite of faith is control.”
-Richard Rhor
How does faith connect with creative practice? What do we as artists and designers have to offer the world? Sometimes when I compare my work as an artist to the work of people who are making a difference by alleviating poverty, finding a cure for cancer or developing technologies to combat climate change, my small contributions to the cultural landscape seem rather paltry. What can art really do in the world? How can my creative practice be an outworking of my faith?
I find Makoto Fujimaura’s long work with IAM and his recent book Culture Care to be a really powerful antidote to the sense of impotence that we sometimes experience as creatives. He lays out a beautiful vision for cultural producers, using ecological metaphors to describe how artists can be an essential part of caring for and nourishing culture.
“Do we, as human being, need more than food and shelter? Do we need beauty in our lives? Given our limited resources, how do we cultivate and care for our souls? And how do these questions apply to the larger culture?”
-Makoto Fugjimura
Art, Design and Faith [Joshua Hale and Dr. Kelly Arbeau]
I love how Hale and Arbeau visualize the relationship between faith, religiosity, art and design in the below infographic. It reveals how closely faith practice in connected with the kind of “faith” required to live a creative life.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.