MaC Conlon's Blog

Where theology concerns itself in how the unseen makes its mark on the material, art concerns itself with making a material trace of the unseen. As a student of theology trained for ministry in a mainline, Canadian Protestant denomination, I struggled with systematic theology, which I found severely limited, in giving an account of faith, when placed in the crucible, or in the hermeneutic, of context and history. It was helpful to view the writers who dared to record in “The Book,” as artists who invited and engaged others to see and hear the illusive, irascible character of the unseen.

In many ways, I’ve seen art as an interpretation, or a translation, of things unseen. And it is that interpretation that gives comfort, that causes disturbance and grants sustenance to both the artist and the viewer.

This exercise is to select a quote that best describes my vision as an artist.

“What is real is not the external form, but the essence of things… it is impossible for anyone to express anything essentially real by imitating its exterior surface.” Constantin Brancusi. This quote echoes much of what Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s character in The Little Prince said, “And now here is my secret, a very simple secret; it is only with the heart that one can see rightly, what is essential is invisible to the eye. “

While it is the artists’ role to interpret and express things that are unseen, it is also their role to state what is obviously there.  Louise Bourgeoise said, “An artist can show things that other people are terrified of expressing.” This is the prophetic act of speaking truth to power as expressed by the young boy when he stated that the emperor has no clothes.

No truer words were spoken as when citizens of Toronto, faced with intolerable cuts to essential services ask, “Where is the gravy?”

Three artists, three poets.

6 people in conversation: 3 artists, 3 poets — how art and poetry inspire each other. Audience participation invited by way of on-the-spot poems and drawings.

Sunday, October 30, 2011 at the Merchants of Green Coffee, 2 Matilda Street, Toronto, ON; Readings start at 2:30 p.m.  Books and Artwork on display, for sale from mid-October until the end of the year.

Artists: Patsy Berton, Tina (Ma.C.) Conlon and Grethe Jensen

Poets: Donna Langevin, Ann Elizabeth Carson and Gianna Partriarca

Art work by Patsy Berton will be posted on this site for poets.

Jacques Lipchitz fled to Toulouse when German troops occupied Paris in 1940. He soon left France for good and went to the US, where he settled in New York. Like Feuchtwanger, he used biblical themes in his sculptures.

In his depiction of sacrifice, Lipchitz gave a lot of attention to Hagar. While the story of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac dominates most of North American and Western European literature, the story of Hagar’s sacrifice was the archetype of the first idea of sacrifice. Hagar was Sarah’s maid, an Egyptian slave-girl, who she directed to bear a child with her husband Abraham, becoming her surrogate. Hagar’s son Ishmael was the first-born of Abraham and was among the first to be circumcised as the sign of the covenant made between Abraham and Deity.

When Sarah eventually gave birth to her son, she could not bear to see Hagar’s son share her husband’s affection and legacy with her son Isaac. She drove Hagar away, saying to her husband, “Cast out this slave woman with her son; for the son of this slave woman shall not inherit along with my son Isaac.”[Genesis 21:10 (NRSV)]. Sarah sent her away to strive in the desert with a skin of water. When the water ran out Hagar could not bear to see the child die so she laid him underneath the bushes. Biblical accounts of the story described how the Deity heard her distress, visited her and argued with her. This was the first account of a person communicating with the Deity without getting struck down, hurt in any way, or having their hair turn white. The Deity showed her a source of water, which was called Zamzam. This water, a promise of life, was accompanied with a promise that Ishmael will live, prosper and be the father of a mighty nation.

This linocut print of Offering  almost did not make it to my first solo exhibit because it looks more like a school exercise. But it is the very first piece of art I have rendered, and it is the story of Hagar.  I was asked if it was Mary, cradling Jesus as in the Pieta.

  I agreed that it could be interpreted in the same way, as Hagar is that story of a mother cradling her child.   These are limited edition prints.

Jacques Lipchitz’s  “Mother and Child” was loaned by the AGO for viewing at the second floor landing at the Four Seasons Centre from fall 2008 to summer 2010.

from a talk given on 5 February 2011

Art, as in painting, is another language.  And language, in a sense, is “transferring,” or translation. I recall my dad’s response to a woman’s impatience at his hesitation when talking about one of his paintings, “I would not have painted it if I could just as easily have spoken about it.”  It is this language that I am beginning to use, and my attempt to provide a material trace of narratives that have been interpreted, heard and transferred from many generations, that painting becomes storytelling.

What is language but just another interpretation, an act of transferring, “From my lips to your ears”?

It could very well be, “from my stomach to your breast,” when a baby indicates hunger to his mother.

We have many ways of communicating and visual imagery has its way of relaying a message just when the early cave dwellers drew pictures of buffalo on the cave walls, stating when the season of hunting is to be expected. “From my hands to your eyes,” to your mind… and so on.

All of us have the ability to create visual imagery.  In the stages of reading, teachers are well aware of the “Grade 4 or 5 cliff.”  Alarm bells ring if a child is unable to read at that age.

I have also observed that it is at that age when most of us, especially those who use this alphabet, stop drawing. At this stage, we usually have started acquiring an abstract sense of our world, identifying symbols as letters, attaching sounds to letters, and as the letters are compounded, we attach meaning to words. But there are times, when words lose their meaning.  This is usually illustrated in the way we use ritual words, or words of courtesy, such as, “please,” “thank you,” “good morning,” or “have a nice day.”

Our society attaches a lot of importance to those who practice the use of these words and we remark, “What a courteous young man! What a nice young lady!”

The age of texting added another complexity with the way we use words, but also an understanding of how well we have abstracted our thinking, where letters can be skipped and a meaning is derived… or perceived differently.

In the 1930s, a Southern politician successfully defeated a worthy opponent by spreading gossip that his opponent’s sister was a thespian and that his opponent practiced pre-marital inter-digitation.

In a way, this is the way we also hear stories.  When we were young, listening to a story being read or told to us, especially when the stories have become dear to us and a word goes out of place, we will say, “No.  That’s not how it goes.” But we don’t mind skipping over the difficult parts.  We make shortcuts, just like Disney would present the gory tales of Grimm into sweet, beautiful “G” rated movies and everyone lives happily ever after. Just as long as we say our “thank you” and “please,” we’ll be okay.

In a way, that is how most Christians read the Bible that is supposed to be the source of stories about faith.  We go immediately to the good parts, and gloss over the difficult parts and we read into it from a perspective of where we are.

A literal, factual approach to the Bible leads to a selective, absolute interpretation so while there are Christians who have no problem wearing clothes made from mix-blend fabric, these same Christians will tell you that homosexuality is a sin while the book of Leviticus speaks strongly against both practices.

Our own interpretations of The Bible are limited by our own perspective and beliefs. These interpretations have led some of us to overly defending and protecting its texts.  I believe that Scripture, just as in any other stories, must be also be read in the other’s eyes, “unprotected,” so to speak, [and Jennifer Knust already beat me to the term “Unprotected Texts.”] I hope that my visual renderings of these stories would amount to a material trace of the narratives, not that the images are masterfully represented, but are “brought to light” from a different perspective, an emerging perspective, as one who only started doing this about five years ago.

Light Break
Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice,
To undo the thongs of the yoke,
To let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?
Is it not to share your bread with the hungry
And bring the homeless poor into your house;
When you see the naked to cover them and not to hide yourself from your own kin?
Then your light shall break forth like the dawn
And your healing shall spring up quickly. [Isaiah 58:1-9a]
This is a silk screen of a photograph I took at the distillery before it was revitalized in the way we see today. This is a limited edition print.

Jephthah’s daughter (Judges 11: 21-40) is Gilead’s granddaughter.  Jephthah was Gilead’s bastard son.  To understand Gilead, one must think of a superhero.  His son, once rejected as a bastard, became regarded as a superhero as well, because he helped deliver his people from their enemies.  But he blamed his daughter when she greeted him after this victory with timbrels and dancing, because he promised to sacrifice the first he sees when he comes home from battle when assured victory.

Jephthah’s daughter was sacrificed.  In this painting, I imagined her in those two months that she wandered in the mountains bewailing her virginity, after which she returned to her father, “who did with her according to the vow he had made.” [Judges 11:39].  So for four days every year the daughters of Israel would go out to lament the daughter of Jephthah, the Gileadite. [11:40].

Dr. Lion Feuchtwanger, who left Germany when Hitler came into power, wrote a novel based on the 47 verses in the book of Judges, Jephta and his Daughter.  He wrote in his notes that the events recorded in the book took place between 1,300 and 1,000 years before the beginning of our epoch. Those who chronicled them, however, lived in the ninth or eight centuries B.C., and the final version was probably written not before the sixth century B.C.  Yet the book contains some of the most powerful stories that can match any superhero fantasy of our time: the war song of Deborah, the folk tales of Gideon, “the Hammerer,” the daredevil, the stories of Samson and the story of Jephta.

Jephtha’s daughter was sacrificed.

In honour of St. Patrick’s Day, I am sharing a reflection I gave at World Food Day in 2004.

World Food Day celebrates the October 1945 founding in Quebec City  of the Food and Agricultural Organization, also known as the FAO. The FAO was founded with the resolve of 44 countries to defeat all hunger and famine. It was at this occasion that the British government first acknowledged that a famine had taken place in Ireland 100 years before.

For those who study the Irish famine, the place of the founding of the FAO is remarkable. Quebec City is just 33 kilometers from Grosse Ile, an island  in the St. Lawrence which was the Canadian disembarkation point for Irish emigrants fleeing the Great Famine, as well as a cemetery for the thousands who were destined to go no further. As we reflect on this history, will we see repeated the same responses and practices  in the way we respond to hunger now?

Since the end of the Eighteenth Century the rural population of Ireland had come to depend on the potato as its staple food because this crop produced more food per acre than wheat and could also be sold as a source of income, although the tuber was not indigenous to Ireland.  In 1845, a fungus that thrived in the wet climate destroyed that year’s potato harvest. The blight continued for two more years, with one million people dying with starvation or ensuing disease.

During the winter of 1845-46, Peel’s government spent £100,000 on American maize which, so as people would not get something for nothing, was sold to the destitute. In 1846, even if the Corn Laws were repealed, it had no effect on hungry people because however cheap the grain was, without money, the Irish peasants could not buy it.

In 1847, no government at Westminster was prepared to give food to the starving, on the grounds that the Irish already were lazy and free food would merely encourage this trait. In contrast, Calcutta, India sent 16,500 pounds of aid, Bombay another 3,000. Florence, Antigua, France, Jamaica and Barbados sent contributions. The Choctaw tribe in North America sent $710. The Quakers, and many synagogues in Britain and America also contributed generously to the Relief Committees for Ireland.

In an effort to ensure that people did not get “something for nothing,” an earlier version of workfare was initiated:  relief schemes such as canal-building and road building to provide employment so as to ensure that only the “deserving” received assistance. The workers were paid at the end of the week and often men died of starvation before their wages arrived. Even worse, many of the schemes were of little use: men filled in valleys and flattened hills just so the government could justify the cash payments.

The major problem was not that there was no food in Ireland – there was plenty of wheat, meat and dairy produce, much of which was being exported to England – but that the Irish peasants had no money with which to buy the food. It was a time when Irish peasants starved in the midst of plenty. Wheat, oats, barley, butter, eggs, beef and pork were exported from Ireland in large quantities during the Famine. In fact, eight ships left Ireland daily carrying many foodstuffs.

Poor tenants amassed huge tax debts they could no longer afford. The imposition of England’s Poor Law made each landlord responsible for subsidizing tenants who paid less than four pounds in yearly rent. One solution was “assisted emigration.” Landlords evicted the poor from the land, and, to be sure to get rid of them, paid for their passage on one of the emigrant ships bound for Canada, Australia or America.

Conditions on the ships that brought the Irish to Canada were appalling. Starvation and cholera combined to make these ships truly “coffin ships.” To cope with this and the want of proper sanitation, Toronto passed sanitary regulation in June 1847, which mandated Quarantine sheds. The first sheds in the city were for cholera and placed at the north-west corner of King and John. Other sheds set up near Bathurst were for typhus. As the health problems and numbers of immigrants kept growing, more sheds were built. Toronto’s first Roman Catholic bishop, Michael Power, died on 1 Oct., 1847, of typhus contracted while attending the immigrants at the fever-sheds.

So famine is not just a far away story: The land bounded by Metro Hall and Parliament Street,  and from here to the lake saw famine, just over 150 years ago.

Memorials can be found at the north entrance to Metro Hall  and at St. Paul’s Church on Queen Street East in remembrance of this part of Toronto’s history.

We recall this history, in the very neighbourhood where so many of the Irish victims of famine ended their days, and bring to mind a similar disaster, the one that occurred in Ethiopia in the 1980s and continues to the current day. But even as we remember, we celebrate this feast today, because there is abundant food, and this abundant food must be shared.

Tina Conlon

St. Lawrence Hall

19 October 2004

my first solo show

ARTbeat Poster 7-reduced The last Old Town ARTbeat event was an art exhibit, “Saphira and Other Stories Brought to Light,” featuring some of my artwork (and Old Town ARTbeat posters!) which was to have been on display at Chaska until Saturday, February 26. Unfortunately, Chaska is closing and I had to take down all the pictures on Monday, February 21.

I was honoured to have so many friends and art appreciators at the reception. After explaining how some of the artwork is trying to offer a material trace of Biblical narratives, many requested more information about these stories and what they mean. The story of Saphira was intriguing; that of Jephthah’s daughter was chilling.

A few people suggested that we hold some study sessions to learn more about these stories, incorporating meditation (yoga?) and prayer. I’ve never really done yoga before (someone else offered!) but am very interested in getting into dissecting these stories, in the way of “unprotected texts”.

Mary Druce, one of our featured artists who is an actress, storyteller, and writer said that she had, at one point, thought to follow up her Shakespeare’s Womyn work with stories from the Bible.

Do let me know if you are interested in any of the study sessions.