Thanks to our Sputnik Patrons, we’ve given a grant to visual artist Elizabeth Kwant. Elizabeth is a Manchester based artist, researcher and curator, who focuses her work on highly raw social issues such as colonialism, immigration detention, and modern slavery.
Her new film, ‘Volta do Mar’, continues that journey closer to home; a meditative performance focused on the interwoven histories of peoples and places in the UK, and the trauma that we find there. We asked our good friend Ally Gordon, from Morphe Arts, to find out more. We were really struck by Elizabeth’s work, and really happy that we could help bring this next piece to the finish line.
Making collaborative work, retelling important stories, and facing up to the demands of social justice are priceless processes. Why not join Patrons scheme for as little as £5/month, and we can give out more micro-grants to artists like Beth, who are taking risks to make difficult work.
Can you tell us a little about your new project, ‘Volta do Mar’?
I’ve been working on this project for a few years now, in an ongoing way. Let me backtrack a little bit to explain where I came from! Back in 2018, I spent a year in the archives of the international slavery museum in Liverpool. I spent time looking into the legacies of transatlantic slavery in the North-West of England.
So looking at the compensation which followed abolition – those plantation owners who received money for slaves; and where did that money go, basically?
That project culminated in a moving image installation, in the museum, in the transatlantic gallery, which was co-created with female survivors of modern day slavery. Through the process I had been looking at trauma, and how we hold it in our bodies; I really wanted women who had experienced a similar trauma to be able to respond to that history through their own stories.
During that time I did all that research, and in some ways it was behind the film but didn’t translate into the film itself. I wanted those women’s voices to be heard, so I didn’t go too deeply into the history around it. So I came away with all these ideas brewing! Volta do Mar comes from that period of time, where I had been researching into Cumbria, where I’m from originally – I was born in a small town called Whitehaven.
As I began to look into the history of colonialism in Cumbria, I realised that Whitehaven was one of the most important port cities in the 18th Century, in the UK, for the trade in tobacco, and later sugar.
Often when one thinks about slavery in the UK we think about Glasgow or Bristol – so that’s an interesting part of the history in Britain.
I think with Cumbria you think of holidays, lakes, the National Trust, the picture perfect postcards! Interestingly I’ve come up against a reluctance to even look into this history, from institutions, tourist sites, even locals in some ways. Across the UK there’s an amnesia about that time in history. It’s generally not taught in schools. So I felt I wanted to somehow perform in some of these locations and places, and bring a kind of embodied presence into those spaces – particularly focused on Whitehaven.
How do you hope this project will help to highlight this part of history?
I think things work on multiple levels with art; often we’re told things in books or in a lecture style, quite a didactic way. I think artwork creates a space to engage with ideas on a heart level, an emotional level.
I really hope that my work does that, the moving image installations that I make do create a physical space as well; I like people to go in and experience the work, I particularly don’t like showing work on a cinema screen, that sit-down, flat, passive experience.
The last piece I made was in a circular room, and people walked in and were surrounded by women who were survivors of slavery, but who were on eye level, so they were engaging with them on an equal par.
It makes me think how art can open a space to discuss things that otherwise we can’t talk about; or to exist in a liminal space where we’re being intuitive over ideas that are difficult to comprehend.
There’s the personal aspect where I’ve been grappling with this as a white Brit; how do I authentically look at these histories in my work? Do I even have a right to? Some would say I don’t, and these issues are really complex. That’s why in the past I’ve chosen to work more collaboratively.
It’s wonderful to hear that Ruth Naomi Floyd is involved in the project, and of course Ruth often sings about her personal family story and her great great grandmother, who was treated truly awfully. Her music brings me to tears! Can you say a little more about that involvement?
I heard Ruth play the jazz flute recently! I’d been up in Cumbria filming, and thinking about the sound; I knew that I wanted to layer sounds. I really love working with found sounds; I wanted the sound of the mining machinery, because it was the coal mines in Whitehaven that exported coal to Ireland, and collected slaves from Africa afterwards. And the sound of the Solway Firth which is the sea there, next to the town.
So I have these layers of sounds that provide a base. When I heard Ruth play, it was just very evocative and emotive, and I thought that’s it!
I really love to be able to collaborate with an artist of Black American heritage, whose family history is linked into the history of slavery; and also somebody who is such a wonderful advocate for racial justice. I can’t think of anybody better to put sound with the film.
So Ruth is going to be composing jazz flute. It won’t necessarily be vocals. She’ll be responding to my performances in the sites. The film is, I suppose, about lament, and in places quite ritualistic. Ruth will be responding to the history of the sites, and also the visuals of the film. And we hope that later in the year she’ll be able to actually visit the sites and respond more emotively to the history of the places.
It strikes me that a work of art of this nature, a performance of film with music, is less didactic, less instructive, but speaks to true events and can be a way to talk about things which are true, in an emotive way. Would that we had more lament in the world!
With the help of our Patrons, we’ve given a grant to Bristol-based performance poet Leeza Awojobi. Leeza’s new piece, ‘The Frayed Elephant’, is a poetry, audio and storytelling piece more akin to a participatory art installation. It’s a new frontier for Leeza, and still in the development stages, so we asked London poet Traysi Benjamin-Matthew to find out more. Along the way they discuss ideas of truth, the problems of social media, and being a whole person outside of your artistic practice.
We love to help out artists who are trying new things in their practice, to encourage them to be bold, stretch themselves, and open up new conversations with their work. Join our Patrons scheme for as little as £5/month, and we can keep supporting artists like Leeza who are doing exactly that.
Hi Leeza! Can you introduce yourself, and your background as an artist?
My name is Leeza Awojobi. I’m a Bristol-based poet and producer. I’ve been doing performance poetry for about four and a half years now. I like to summarise my poetry with the themes/words ‘eyes and oath’. So ‘eyes’ refer to observation, perception, and intent; and an ‘oath’ is a testimony of truth, or a solemn promise. And these are two ideas I regularly go back to in my practice, and I feel like they really ground my work.
Can you tell us about the piece that Sputnik is helping to fund?
So thanks to you guys, I get to develop this idea that’s probably been a year and a half in the making. It’s called ‘The Frayed Elephant’. It’s a poetry, audio and storytelling piece that features materials. So currently I imagine it to be a solitary experience, where people listen to the poetry and storytelling pieces on headphones, and at the same time they get to play with, interact and respond to materials.
Why that title, the Frayed Elephant?
That title basically comes from a parable that I came across called ‘the blind men and the elephant.’ It’s the story of six blind men who are all feeling on different parts of the elephant – one is feeling the trunk and says ‘ an elephant is like a snake’. Another is feeling a leg and says ‘no, no, an elephant is like a tree’.
The moral is that because we’re coming from different perspectives, we shouldn’t judge each other on claims to truth.
But the ‘Frayed Elephant’ also came out of a critique I heard of that story – if there’s no absolute truth, if it’s all just for grabs, who is the person looking into the frame? Who is the person who claims to see the whole picture, and has the objective view to say that everyone else is blind? I think the moral is a good one, that we should strive towards tolerance, or shouldn’t allow our personal angle to create division; but how do we exist, and co-exist in a society without any anchoring?
Do you find something limiting in the usual ‘performance’ dynamic between artist and audience? Or how would you see it?
That’s a good question, I wouldn’t say there are limitations. I think there are just different ways of viewing performance. I want to enable whoever I engage with, in this piece at least, to engage more actively.
There’s so much you can do in that kind of traditional, unidirectional way of storytelling that we’re used to. But this is just a different way of doing it.
Can you tell us why you feel connected to the material personally, and why it’s important to make this work?
I guess this grew out of – partly that parable – but it also came out of my relationship with social media. Gradually over the years I’ve just taken myself off various platforms. I’ve always had a very back-and-forth relationship with social media. It wasn’t an environment that I felt I could thrive in, if I wanted to engage with it properly.
Any top tips for those who are starting out in poetry?
Definitely write! Sometimes, it comes out so clunky, it’s not flowing; but just having that regular time of writing – twice a week, for example.
At various times I’ve written every day. I don’t do that all the time – for some people that’s their thing, I don’t put that pressure on myself but I do write regularly, and if I feel like I’m getting stuck, I do make an effort to not stay there.
And how do you do that? How do you get out of the space of being unable to write?
I think to be honest my faith helps a lot. We’re whole people. The way society is set up, and the way work can be set up, is that we cut ourselves off from different parts of ourselves. But we’re whole people.
If I’m not writing, there’s usually something deeper going on. Maybe I’m stuck because I feel overwhelmed, and the pressure of being an artist is too much; maybe I’m looking at my work and thinking ‘this is rubbish’! But whether it’s rubbish or not, who am I outside of my work?
Because as artists we’re pouring ourselves out, we can get so wrapped up in our practice and that can be where our identity is rooted. But actually I try to be careful about that. While poetry is always going to be inside me, it can’t be all that ultimately defines me, or all that I live for.
You’ve been writing poetry for a while. Can you tell me when you felt actually “I am a poet”?
That’s a good question! It’s kind of difficult to answer because I did have a moment when I decided to pursue it professionally, but I’ve been writing since I was a kid. But that moment came about through the mentorship I received when I did a Christian internship; I had the privilege of being mentored by Cully and Ally from Morphe Arts.
It wasn’t something I had been encouraged to do or seen other people in my sphere do. But with their encouragement and others, they helped me realise, “you can do this, this is a thing, this is legitimate!’ People do see the value of poetry and engaging with people culturally.
That’s another tip surely, surrounding yourself with like-minded people who can mentor and guide you along that poetry journey, isn’t it? So what’s next, what will you be working on?
Well what’s next is this, really! I’m really looking forward to returning to my ideas and thinking about who I can potentially collaborate with. I want it to be an audio piece which may or may not feature music, for example. So that’s what I’ll be doing!
Thanks to Sputnik Patrons, we’ve given a grant to painter Sam O’Donnell. Alongside pursuing his own craft, Sam is a part-time church leader in Glasgow, and he approached us with a promising community project: opening a gallery space in the city centre, to exhibit local painters. We’re supporting the launch exhibition, ‘Opening’, which runs from 15th to 29th September. We asked our friend Katrina Moss—who runs the Chaiya Arts Award—to speak to Sam about how this project came about.
We love the idea of Adelaide Place church giving part of their building over to the broader creative community. As Sam says, getting exhibited in a professional gallery space means a lot to an artist, and the spirit of generosity here exemplifies what Sputnik is about. If that inspires you too, why not join Patrons scheme for as little as £5/month.. and we can give out more micro-grants to artists like Sam, who are busy blessing the place they live.
Can you introduce yourself to our readers?
Hi, I’m Sam O’Donnell, I live up in Glasgow. I’ve been here for about 10 years now; I’m from Manchester originally, and I moved here to study at Glasgow School of Art. I’m a painter, but I’m also on staff here at a city centre church called Adelaide Place Baptist Church. So I paint part-time and work for the church part-time.
So tell us a bit more about the project that Sputnik is helping to fund.
So, I’m going to be launching a new gallery space, here in the church building. It’s going to be called ‘A Place’ gallery. Sputnik is helping with the launch exhibition, the first exhibition of the gallery, from the 15th to the 29th of September.
It’s coinciding with the Doors Open Days festival that happens in the city, where lots of buildings in the city are open to the public to explore. The exhibition has about 15 painters in it, who are based in Scotland or have significant ties to Glasgow.
The 15 artists that are taking part, are they artists that share your faith, or otherwise?
All the artists—they’re not people from the church, they’re all practising artists of varying degrees, people from all walks of life.
Are the exhibitions going to be based around a theme? And what was the catalyst behind the idea?
There’s no particular theme; this first exhibition is a group exhibition, just to get more people in the room, and get the gallery on the map a little. The idea in the future will be solo shows, with some of the artists I’ve already been talking to.
The impetus behind the galleries—it’s been a long road, an idea I’ve had for maybe 6 or 7 years. It’s coincided a little bit with what’s going on at the church, where we’ve recently completed some renovation works. So basically we have this room that’s off to the side of the church building, that’s not a liturgical space or a ‘worship’ space.
Like many artists I’m sure, straight after graduation I experienced very few opportunities. When things did finally come around, an exhibition or show I could be part of, it really meant a lot. It really means a lot to be approached, for someone to take interest in your work.
So I felt the church has the opportunity to do that, to offer something that’s generous to artists: to take interest in their work on their terms. And to do that with a gallery space that would be professional, that would make sense in the contemporary artist environment. To do that generously.
Everybody I’ve spoken to is so honoured and thrilled to be involved, so it’s been a really meaningful process.
I know from talking to artists that’s one of the hardest things—how you get connected to a gallery space, and get your work seen by a wider audience. I wondered how the church felt when you approached them about taking this space?
I’m lucky and privileged to be in a church that already values creativity and what creatives bring. I’ve been part of the church community about 10 years, and on staff for about 7 of those. My role has always been in the creative arts. So the church has already had an investment in that. And there’s always been an entrepreneurial spirit, to want to bless the city we’re part of.
So you do a mix of different styles in your own painting. What inspires your own personal creativity?
It maybe sounds strange to frame it this way, but one of the most important things for me is to make a commitment, and follow it through. When I was studying I felt like I had to make a decision to become a painter. Today there’s so many ways to be an artist, so many mediums you can work with. To make a decision to stick to one medium, and go the long distance in that art form – it’s quite a decision to make.
And so for me that’s then what inspires the creative field I’m in; I suppose I know what I’m there to do even when I’m not quite feeling it or if I don’t have any ideas. I know what I’m committed to, and that helps me to build the long distance.
In terms of my Christian faith as well, to make a lifelong step in faith is to make a decision in that way. So the things go hand in hand.
With the help of our Patrons, we’ve given one of this term’s grants to actor, musician and writer Ali Mylon, who is developing an original theatre script about home, identity and meeting ‘the other’. We invited Harri Mardlin, director of LifeBox Theatre Company, to speak to Ali about the project’s journey, and what it represents in her own personal and professional life.
We love to support creative professionals who are stretching their ambitions into new places. It’s not easy to do, and it requires support! Join our Patrons scheme for as little as £5/month, and we can give out more micro-grants to artists like Ali, who are articulating important stories for us all.
Answers have been edited for brevity, watch the whole interview above:
Please introduce yourself Ali!
I’m Ali Mylon, primarily an actor-musician, although I work in voiceover as well. I’ve worked in TV, film, theatre, and commercials. I took a music degree, and then in my late 20s contacted the drama school that had offered me a place at 18 – so I retrained at that stage. I’ve been working in the industry for nearly 15 years now.
Tell us about the project that Sputnik is funding.
Several years ago I started making a theatre piece, with music, called Dance With Me. It’s set around the time of the Brexit vote. It’s a story of two people: Annette, who’s a Polish migrant, and Tony, who’s a taxi driver from Sheffield. It’s really a story about their meeting, their friendship, and actually how their friendship draws out of them their needs, their wants, their perception of home and what it means to create a safe environment for their families.
I’m really interested to know how you feel connected to the material, and why you think it’s important to make this work.
At the time of the Brexit vote, I was teaching English as a foreign language, in a class of primarily Polish students. Everything was so heightened then – I saw the impact it had on individuals and the community. At the same time, I came back from London to Sheffield, got a taxi ride and had this really interesting conversation with the taxi driver. It just really struck me that even though on paper the ‘Leave’ and ‘Remain’ vote seemed poles apart, the two characters and their needs and wants were very similar.
I started imagining, what if these two characters met? How would their prejudices impact each other? Could they draw out from themselves what is it to feel ‘at home’? Is it about being in a specific country? Is it about feeling safe? Or is it much more an inward struggle about feeling you’ve ‘arrived’, that you’re at peace?
It’s also a bit of a personal testimony of how I grew as a performer and individual, how I became much more comfortable in my own skin. I feel like I’m actually Ali Mylon, and content and happy to be who I am.
It’s a good place to reach isn’t it?
It is a good place! It’s obviously a work in progress. But it’s that inward battle of just knowing what it is to feel comfortable, and content.
As performers, that can be a real challenge I think.
Because everything out there is so uncontrollable, and constantly shifts. As a performer, 95% of life is about rejection, not getting the jobs, or working out whether something is a good thing for you to pursue, or not. But actually if you’re coming from a place where you feel contentment – that sort of changes everything really.
Who’s your target audience, and why is that?
I’m working with a fantastic director, Sally Proctor. She’s assistant director for the National Theatre, and she’s really passionate about community work, telling stories that are authentic, and truthful.
She really wants us to work closely with the Polish community in Sheffield, but also the working men’s community. So I suppose we want to work in these communities and tell these stories, so that’s a target audience in itself; but also the people of Sheffield, and anyone who wants to hear this story.
The time of Brexit was significant, it heightened things, and maybe those questions that it raised within us are still as relevant today as they were; just maybe they’ve been dampened down a bit.
What would you hope for the future of the piece?
I’d love it to be told in Sheffield theatres, for it to become a production! Obviously I’m aiming high, I’d like it to be taken on by the larger theatres, but I’d be happy for it to be taken on in community centres and smaller venues. I just think it’s a story that is valuable and important to tell.
Thanks to our patrons community, we’ve given a grant towards View35 Film’s new original project, ‘The Draw’. The Edinburgh-based “dream team” led by Shelley and Tom Ruddock are writing, directing and producing their own dystopian drama—and our self-confessed film nerd Jonny Mellor spoke to Shelley to find out more.
Art doesn’t grow on trees! It costs money to make, especially for those with big ambitions. Even micro-grants make a difference to projects like these, as well as being an irreplaceable encouragement to those making them. Join our Patrons scheme for as little as £5 / month – and we can help companies like View35 to keep challenging themselves, drawing stories out of the Christian imagination.
Answers have been edited for brevity, watch the whole interview above:
Can you introduce yourself?
I’m Shelley Ruddock – I’m a film producer, and also the co-founder of View35 Films, which is based in Edinburgh and London.
And you work in partnership with your husband Tom? What roles do you both take?
We see ourselves really as a dream team! We are a real partnership as you say – he is a writer/director, I specialise as a producer; but we also both have a lot of experience across different roles. We really do see it as “us” when we make a project, and we love working together on the stories that Tom’s created.
What are some of the different projects you’ve worked on, that you’re proud of?
What I love about our job is that we have so much variety. We had a cool job with Lego recently—we got to go into Warner Brothers studios, on a night shoot, and walk around the place.
You contacted us about your first feature film—can you fill us in on that?
We’re so grateful for the help – it’s our first feature film, a sci-fi drama set in an alternate present, called The Draw. There’s a lot of twists and turns along the way, but essentially it’s a story about human connection.
One of our crew members put it perfectly as a merge between Black Mirror and 1984! We’ve filmed principal photography—we did a three-week shoot in Edinburgh already, and we’ll be doing a pick-up shoot in London, and we’re in the midst of post-production.
We’re aiming to have it finished by September/October in time for the Sundance deadline, to give us a good goal to work towards. We’d love to release it early next year, but it all depends how it does on film festivals, and pushing to streaming platforms after that. Next year, hopefully, will be the release.
For anyone reading, how can they help bring this vision to life?
We are still raising money for the London side of the shoot and for the post-production, to help us make the best film we can possible make. Anybody can support Tom and me through the Buy Me a Coffee website — or they can get in touch with us, if somebody would like to be more involved in the journey, to be a partner in it.
With the help of our patrons community, we’ve given a grant to Cornwall visual artist Jem Bunce. Sputnik’s Jemma Mellor spoke to Jem about his new opportunity voyaging to the Outer Hebrides, with a plan to develop new artworks and see what other inspiration happens along the way!
Often the financial risk gets in the way of artists saying “yes” to the unusual and even life-changing opportunities that may come their way. Join our Patrons scheme for as little as £5 / month – and we can help artists to take risks and detours like this one, building their craft as they go.
Jem, who are you and what do you do?
I’m Jem – I live in beautiful Cornwall, and I’m an odd-jobber and an artist!
Can you tell us about the project you’re about to embark on?
A friend of mine invited me to sail around the Inner and Outer Hebrides for two weeks. I’m just going to take my sketchbook, I’m going to draw. When I do any drawing, I don’t really know where it’s going, but I’m going to record – not just places I see, but my experience. I’ll get back with piles of paper, and maybe turn them into prints, paintings, and so on.
It’s an experience, which I’ll record visually. And it’s apparently an incredibly beautiful place, and very remote. The plan is — if we can — we’ll go to this remote island, St Kilda. There’s now no population there. Four-hundred metre high cliffs; a huge bird population. It’ll be quite dramatic – even just the journey there!
Your work often begins with sketching on location. What particularly drew you the Scottish Isles, and the potential extremes there?
We live in a remote-ish part of the country anyway. Cornwall is absolutely beautiful, and we live right in the middle of it. Having lived in towns, in London and other places – when you live in a remote place, you become smaller because everything seems bigger around you. The sky seems bigger, the landscape seems bigger; there’s something about your connection, understanding what you see but also yourself in that environment.
Hopefully being in the Outer Hebrides will be like that, to the next degree. I think the subject matter is “me”, and the experience of being there.
You’ll sketch locations but then bring it all back into the studio. Is there something that changes in that transition?
It’s an open-ended journey when you start out on a drawing. Sometimes I make things difficult for myself — or arguably easier — I set myself targets: ”five drawings in twenty-five minutes” or something, where I don’t have time to think. So I’m making intuitive, quick marks —and then the sketchbook will lie closed for a few months, maybe a year. When I come back to it, I’m reacting to that drawing, to the marks I’ve made.
In terms of art and faith, where does that come in for you?
Creation is, certainly, completely extravagant. God is just this extraordinary creator; everything’s just crazy and intricate and diverse. And then God says ‘I want you to create, as well’… we’ve got something of his creative nature in us. That in itself is a legitimate reason for being. At a basic level, that’s where my faith comes into it.
Also, painting is really hard; I genuinely go into it saying “God, will you help me..” When I’m looking at nature, I can actually talk to the person who made it — that’s crazy! This amazing relationship with the creator, this glorious sense of connection — that informs my work.
With the help of our patrons community, we’ve given a grant to dance company Nova Grace Productions. Our good friend Marlita Hill spoke to Nova Grace’s Rosy Nevard about their new project, ‘Unlocked’—a project which emerged out of lockdown, taking their creative performances developed over Zoom and converting them into a new stage production.
As Rosy says, it’s tough to make the profit margins work on original productions! It’s a joy to help artists realise the projects that they want to create. Join our Patrons scheme for as little as £5 / month – and we can help companies like Nova Grace bring their brilliant ideas to the public.
You’re the artistic director of Nova Grace Productions. What should we know about Nova Grace?
We’re a collection of lovely dancers, Christian and non-Christian. I co-founded the company back in 2016 as a social enterprise. Our initial way of doing things didn’t work out—we’re now a charity. We do all sorts of projects, working internationally—giving people a chance to be involved in dance, to spread to joy, and use it as a way to connect with people.
We’ve started to do our own creative projects, too—theatre, choreography and dance.
Tell us more about what Sputnik is funding.
Thanks so much to Sputnik, and the supporters and patrons—it really does make a huge difference.
The whole project developed out of lockdown; theatres were closed, we had no work to do, back in March 2020. We started doing ballet classes on Zoom, just to keep active, and keep in touch. We started creating, and exploring the environment of our homes.
In the end, we had four 15-minute sections that we’d created at different moments in time, as the lockdowns came and went. We put them together for a virtual performance on Zoom; but as soon as we were able to get back together, we decided to adapt it for stage. We’ve now added a fifth section, using memory and spoken word, using people’s voices. We’re taking it on tour this week!
What was it like to adapt this work from a virtual context to a stage production?
It was so joyful to be back together again. Zoom kept us going, but it was so difficult dance-wise, to stay in time with each other! But adapting the piece has meant so much decision-making. It’s been exhausting.
But it has been fun and exciting. To have a live audience and that feedback, the energy and atmosphere, that’s what theatre is. So I’m really looking forward to it.
When people come to see ‘Unlocked’, what do you hope they walk away with?
We want people to come on the journey with us. Not everybody wants to talk about lockdown—we lived through it, we want to forget about it. But we feel it’s important to talk about things.
We want people to engage with their thoughts and emotions. To find positivity: we did get through it; but also it’s a nod to the hard times, and to the people who lost their lives, the sadness of the whole thing. We want to acknowledge it and pay our respects to it.
Your work explores social issues and difficult topics. What led you to do this, and why is dance the right medium?
Dance is the right medium because we’re dancers! Dance is the tool that I have. But the reason I really believe in it is that it can be interpreted by each person; it speaks without words, and sometimes expresses more than language can.
You’re normally sat in silence watching dance, so you have time to reflection, and your own thoughts, depending what moves you within what you’re seeing.
Finally, how do your faith and art inform one another in the way you work?
It definitely informs how I approach my work; often I don’t have a lot of confidence, in taking risks or pushing ideas that you don’t necessarily feel you’re qualified to pursue. But my confidence and my strength definitely comes from my faith.
And also how I work with other people—the Christians in our company want to use our work relationships to shine God’s light, to show patience, kindness, gentleness, to other people. Because those are not things that are always seen in pressurised environments, like theatre environments can be!
With the help of our patrons community, we’ve given a grant to London rapper Kwakzino, for his new project ‘Livewire’. Our good friend Joel Wilson spoke to Kwakz about his journey, process and hopes; they also discuss why hip-hop and grime seem uniquely accepting of expressions of faith, with mainstream artists from Stormzy to Kendrick leading the trend.
We love to support artists who are embedded in their scene and serving their community, while they work on their craft. Join our Patrons scheme for as little as £5 / month – and we can help artists like Kwakzino to keep getting better and better.
Can you introduce yourself and your creative work?
My name is Kwakz, aka Kwakzino. I’m a lyricist, rapper – I also do youthwork, putting on community projects for young people. I feel the Lord gave me a gift when I was young, sparked a passion in me when I was 13 years old, and it’s continued with me ever since.
What was your pivotal moment when you took your art more seriously?
I remember hearing different sounds in school – and back in my day we had pirate radio stations, so I remember trying to tune in my cassette player to find a particular station. I started trying to write and rap lyrics to my peers – then I found likeminded individuals, so I become part of a tribe. We called it a crew back then. It was buzzing, that’s the only way to describe it, this new sound in London at the time.
How much has your inspiration changed over time? Who gives you that same energy?
That’s a whole different conversation! My inspiration comes from things closer to home – my sons, my wife, friends and family members. I’m very thankful to even be alive, to have a family, to see my kids grow. That’s what inspires me.
I can’t deny God’s love when I see my boys waking up, jumping around, farting! I’ve got to give thanks. It’s not easy out here.
Tell us a little about the project Sputnik is funding.
The project is a song called Livewire. It just sounds clean, very professional. That’s my friend Illusion – he’s a real maestro on the keyboard. The beat kind of reminds me of 21 Seconds from 20 years ago – we’ve captured that kind of sound, but then pairing it with 20 years life experience since then. It’s reflecting on the journey, and how God came into my life.
Before God came into my life, I was like a live wire, a ball of energy. Until God came and grounded me. That’s why I like to say it’s ‘because of him’, he’s connected me, and now I’m in the circuit and now everything’s flowing, instead of being all over the place.
So who’s your audience for this? What do you want people to get from your work?
It’s a question I’ve asked myself for years. My music is targeted at the hopeless – because God gave me hope – but not in an inauthentic way, or cheesy way, just in an honest way.
But it’s also for people with hope, to encourage those with hope for them to get active on their projects, for them to want to take on life, help others, show love, be grateful.
What’s special about grime or hip-hop that people can talk about faith, and people seem to accept that? Christian faith is perceived as mainstream for rappers.
It’s a very deep question. I take my hat off to Stormzy, because he’s been more vulnerable than I’ve ever been. I believe God had his hand on Stormzy in that.
I think Hip-hop is unapologetic. Grime is unapologetic. That allows people to say what they want to say on those types of beats. We’ve had Lil Nas X rapping what he wants to rap about. Lil Uzi Vert rapping what he wants to rap about. And then we’ve got the Novelist, I Am Deyah, others who have a faith and they’re not ashamed to say it.
There’s never been such a healthy time for artists to express themselves. I’m a Christian and I make music, but the majority of my fans are not Christians.
Can you talk a little bit about themes or concepts that are recurring in your work?
Well God worked on me. I was living a negative lifestyle; selling drugs, robbing, treating girls wrong. It was anger. God knew I didn’t want to live the lifestyle. I hated myself. I couldn’t even look myself in the mirror. Every day my mindset was- who am I going to abuse? Who am I going to negatively affect today?
God provided me a way out. I was facing jail – the judge said if you ever come back to me, you’re going straight to jail. I managed to get out of my area my God’s grace. That’s when I started working with young people – I didn’t want them to be making the same steps I had. I’ve been doing youthwork heavily for the last 8 years.
Because of my life, and the circle my life has gone on, in my music I talk about this. What it was like before God, what it’s like since God. I won’t lie, I wrote about it so much, I hated it! I was sick and tired of talking about the street. I’ve talked about it. I was like God, I need a new song now.
I want to talk about family life. I’ve not written a song about my kids, but they’re everything to me. But that’s what’s to come.
Thanks to our generous patrons, we’ve given a grant to Eek & Wild, a fresh, fun and joy-filled dance company. Emily, Ella and Katie began making work together in lockdown, and have since become Artists in Residence at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, where they’ll be staging their new creative project, ‘Sculpt’. Our friend Sarah Rabone spoke to the trio about their process and journey so far.
We love to support projects like ‘Sculpt’, that are serving the community around them while also allowing for embodied, free creative expression. Join our Patrons scheme for as little as £5 / month – and we can keep supporting artists like Eek & Wild in their boundary-breaking explorations.
So who is Eek and Wild?
Katie Albon: Eek and Wild is the three of us – we are all independent dancers, all self-employed; we formed together as a company during lockdown because we all wanted something fun to do. We decided to make c couple of dance films together, and really loved working together. So we’ve just evolved into making work together more regularly.
Tell us a little more about the project that Sputnik is going to be funding, ‘Sculpt’.
Ella Fleetwood: We’ve been artists in residence at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital for nearly two years now. We’ve been working on the children’s ward, performing our pop-up dances, which are really short – can be performed by the bedside. But we wanted to make something really big, something where we can really move, and push ourselves physically and artistically.
The hospital had been looking at getting some work that happens in the atrium spaces, something really big and impactful. The hospital has a huge art collection, with amazing sculptures all over the hospital. We chose three of the sculptures, and started to chat with the children on the wards about them, and if they could imagine a dance about them.
Katie: So we took the children’s ideas and some of our own ideas and formed these three dances based on the sculptures. It’s been a long process; we’ve been able to use the hospital’s studio space. But more recently the Sputnik funding has enabled us to get some space of our own and refine what we’ve made, to rehearse it and spend a bit more time together.
Ella: There’s a real difference between having a sketch and having something ‘performance ready’. That’s what the funding has helped us to do.
What are the joys and maybe the difficult practicalities of working in a hospital context, at bedsides and around machines?
Emily Yong: One of the joys is that it’s a much more intimate performance. You’re making time and space for an individual child, and I think that makes them feel quite special. They get choice over what they see. And I think it also broadens the horizons and expectations of what dance is. When we say “would you like to see a dance today”, they think we’re going to take them into a different space; and we say “no we can do it right here by your bed” — they have no idea what they’re going to see.
Katie: It is tricky because you’re in a tiny room, there’s a bed, there’s machines, a sink behind you, a rail above you, and there’s three of us! But it causes us to have to think on our feet, and we all love improvisation, we all love to play. Because we’ve worked together a while, we can read each other well.
The other challenge is wearing a mask – our work is playful and fun, we use our faces a lot. Though you can do a lot with your eyes, in terms of connection.
You’ve talked about choice and interaction. I can imagine a child might want to move and collaborate with you in some way; in the future would you think about pushing that idea of collaboration, to moving with your audiences?
Ella: On the wards, at the end of our dance we have an open invite to interaction, which often leads to some sort of improvisation. So it can sometimes lead to movement with the children.
With this new show we have no idea what’s going to happen! I think we’re open and excited at the prospect that interaction could happen. There’s an invite there.
Katie: It also comes down to hospital precautions; it’s taken a lot for us to be allowed to perform in a public space. I’m hoping it can go there – if we’re told it’s safe enough.
Being dancers and Christians, how does that dynamic work for you?
Emily: We all work in different contexts, sometimes a faith-based one, sometimes outside that. I think we’re just the same person in each context. We’re not “more Christian” in one area.
There’s so many beautiful aspects of the Christian faith – love, peace, joy, kindness, patience; I hope those underpin the way I behave in any context, and in everyday life too. Maybe the separation of pockets of life isn’t that helpful a view. Our faith permeates into everything.
Our patrons community has helped us to give a grant to illustrator, animator and storyteller, Janet Kutin—aka the INKtrovert—whose meditative approach to her illustration comes through in vivid, multi-layered characters. Janet approached us with a very personal project, giving her the opportunity to expand into writing along with her illustrations, to produce a “small, but personally ambitious” anthology.
We often find artists have passion projects locked away in them just waiting for the opportunity to be expressed, and these can often be incredibly moving, full-blooded works that shed light on the world around us. Join our Patrons scheme for as little as £5 / month – and we can keep supporting artists like Janet who have even more hidden depths to show us all.
Hi Jae. Can you introduce yourself to our good readers.
Hey, I’m ‘The INKtrovert’… but yes, more commonly known as Jae… and also sometimes Janet. I’m a film-obsessed Storyteller that’s been trading (and hiding) under that not-so-covert-personally-trait brand name for about 10 years now, having started during University—but long before that, I was telling stories in my journals and on the covers of my school books.
You’re an Illustrator, an Animator, but most of all a Storyteller. How do these elements come together in your practice?
They get involved with each other, because although my role has mainly been illustrating, concepts naturally branch out. I usually have specific ideas that I don’t want to be limited.
I personally use animation and writing in varied ways, or collaborate with others, rather than execute certain parts of a project myself—because I have a healthy awareness of where I lack in my abilities. It really depends on the project, but Illustration is my primary practice—I know it very well. Some briefs, whether self-initiated or not, call for an extension of myself so that’s why I chose the title Storyteller. It neatly explains what I do, but also sparks intrigue because the word can mean something different to everyone, resulting in more questions about my work, which is not bad.
You have the ability to be able to give even simply drawn characters real personality. What is your process regarding creating engaging characters through your work?
My process is slow and probably seems unnecessarily long to most people. By that I mean I delight in studying characteristics, researching beyond what I am seeing and including salient themes or elements even if it is a simple task; I meditate on them, if that makes sense. I love hiding motifs and small but (to me) significant details in my work that may appear random to some. To be honest, I don’t think I can fully articulate how I give ‘life’ to some of my drawings—I think that’s just how I see them in my head so they actually look normal to me! I guess my artistic expression mixed with years of skill-learning has developed a collectively weird, familiar method to my making.
It’s a privilege to be able to support a new project you’re working on through our patrons scheme. Can you talk us through it?
So this project started years ago when I was having a bit of a rough time in all areas of my life. When something like this happens, I tend to write rather than draw; it flows more naturally. I was frustrated and confused about a lot of things going on with me. So, not wanting to simply write about what was happening exactly, I tried a more productive approach to process it all. This anthology I am putting together is a raw, written reflection on myself with a few illustrations here and there (in addition to some somewhat colourful prints to keep the mood light). It’s small, but ambitious on a personal level, so my only hope is that I can produce something I can boldly share.
Our patrons community has helped us to give a grant to visual artist, curator, collector, story teller and educator, Sarah Grace Dye. Sarah approached us with an incredibly unique project: in partnership with carpet makers in Uzbekistan, she’s developed a technique for making paper from scraps of silk; we’re funding her journey there to teach the methodology to the workshop owners themselves.
Cross-cultural, environmental, creative projects like this – infused with the uniqueness of Sarah’s own material-making practice – don’t just pop up everyday. Join our Patrons scheme for as little as £5 / month – and we can keep supporting great artists like Sarah take experimental leaps into life. Find out more here.
Hi Sarah. Who are you and what do you do?
I am a visual artist, curator, collector, story teller and educator from Sheffield, now living in Frankfurt. I make artists’ books, make paper and draw. I love paper.
After University, I found my home teaching on an extended diploma course in Art and Design (amongst other things) at the Arts University Bournemouth. I think my 12 years there were actually my training ground for what I do, and who I am now, artistically. It was such a vast and varied course—I taught all sorts of things, and was able to sneak into sessions taught by others to learn new techniques and processes.
That is where I was introduced to paper-making and some forms of book binding, all of which are key to my practice now. Working with some wonderful students and staff over those years was a privilege and an enormous source of inspiration. I think I learnt more than I taught! I still teach now (mostly via zoom) but it is in smaller groups or one on one with tailored sessions for each group/person.
Your artistic practice has all sorts of different facets – from drawing, to curating collections, to making paper. How did you find your way into these specific disciplines? Do you see your practice further evolving into different areas in the future?
My practice is all about re-using the resources we have around us in our homes. I make paper from household waste, as well as making inks and dyes. I love to draw, and have a regular drawing and mark-making practice as part of a couple of Zoom drawing groups with other fascinating women from around the world.
I have always been fascinated by books in a kind of love-hate relationship. My parents were collectors (or hoarders!) and had a huge library of books. They both were theological scholars and so had many very old fascinating books in English, Latin and Greek. I was mesmerised by these books. I loved the smell, the touch and the patterns the words made on the page and often there would be etchings of diagrams and pictures.
I have to confess to never reading any of them! I was not a fan of reading. I am dyslexic and reading was a struggle so not enjoyable whereas drawing was completely consuming for me and took me to my happy place. I still have a very old complete set of the greek new testament and a 150 + year old copy of Josephus ‘The Life of Christ’ for example that fascinate me. As a child my parents kept a cupboard of packaging, paper, plastic bottles glue and scissors that were accessible at all times, we were always encouraged to create and express ourselves.
I am always excited to learn new techniques and processes, especially in the current climate as we learn so much more about how we can help sustain our planet through our use of its resources. My practice is always evolving, often in response to a circumstance. I got stuck in Frankfurt in March 2020 for five months with no materials and no money to buy anything. That was when paper-making came into its own, and I researched and gleaned information about making natural ink and dyes to provide something interesting to draw with. I collected tea bags and packaging from around the house to use that paper for book making and to draw on.
Curating was a natural step for me. I am an inherent organiser. I am interested in the detail of things and how one thing reacts to another. Even as a teenager my bedroom walls were covered in pictures carefully placed to make a pleasing whole. I have always collected things. My parents had many friends living abroad, who would come and visit and bring me amazing little gifts, many of which I still have.
As well as being an accomplished artist, you also have experience of working with artists as a university tutor and community builder. What lessons have you learnt about nurturing and encouraging creative gifts in others?
I am a firm believer that everyone has the ability to create, regardless of what they might think! I love the challenge of presenting an opportunity and then teasing out whatever creativity is lurking dormant. Encouragement and enthusiasm are the most important aspects of teaching.
Firstly: nothing is wrong. The worst mistake you can make will always teach you something, even if that is to never do that thing again! I would also encourage students to never throw work away. I can’t tell you how many times a student has hated something they have created, only to love it several weeks later after it has been put away in a draw.
Secondly: we are all unique. You will never create like me, or me like you; we have our own marks and style. It is simply a case of uncovering what is already there, and developing that uniqueness. Yes, it is important to glean knowledge from others, and be inspired; but then make it your own.
Thirdly: having space without pressure is also a key to creativity. It can be difficult to find that in our busy lives, but in my experience finding that space can enrich the rest of your day/week no end. For me just making some marks with ink or a pencil, never mind what it looks like, is a tonic in any situation. It is the doing and connection to the creativity inside of us that is important.
When I moved back to Sheffield, I had a small self-contained flat in the attic of where I lived. I started a residency program for people to come and spend between one week to a month free of charge in that space to focus on whatever creative project they had bubbling up. I worked closely with Bank Street Arts in Sheffield, and often the residency would end up with an exhibition in that space. I would try my best to support whatever the project was in whatever way they needed while they were there. It has always been completely delightful to see people blossom and fill up with joy being given that space to explore what they love. Thats what it’s all about for me.
I think the key to building community and support is simply to really listen. What does the community need? Then you can act upon it in whatever small way you can. We each have to recognise how important we are as part of the whole and not wait for someone else to start.
Through our patrons scheme, we are helping to fund a fascinating project you are working on. Can you bring us all up to speed on what you’re doing?
I am currently experimenting with using little scraps of silk threads mixed with egg boxes to make paper. I have a dear friend who moved to Uzbekistan many years ago and set up a carpet workshop. He researched the process and designs and then taught the locals their own traditional skills in natural silk dying and weaving to create the most beautiful carpets. This knowledge had been lost during the Soviet era where traditional crafts were not allowed. You can read his story in the book A Carpet Ride to Khiva: Seven Years on the Silk Road by Chris Aslan Alexander. Today, it is a thriving workshop that employs many.
I mentioned to him that I use the fluff from the dryer to make my paper soft and strong, and he asked if maybe I could try to make paper with the silk scraps that are left on the floor after a carpet is finished. These scraps are currently discarded as rubbish. This prospect just ignited an excitement in me that I hadn’t felt in a long time. So a parcel arrived from Uzbekistan with little bags of coordinated silk scraps for me to play with.
Technically you are not supposed to use animal fibres for the paper making process, just plant fibres, but I never take no for an answer and love a problem to solve! I have successfully made paper and am now exploring both felt-making from the scraps and also a line of products that can be made with the paper/felt to sell at the carpet workshop. I am travelling to the workshop at Easter to share my methods and show them the products with the hope that they will generate a new line of income from their own waste materials.
I am so grateful for the money I was granted as it paid my bills for a month so I could concentrate on my experimentation without worry. It basically offered me the space I mentioned earlier! There is much more experimentation to come before I travel there, but that only fills me with joy and excitement at what might be discovered next.
Thanks to our wonderful patrons, we’ve given a grant to folk-grunge singer-songwriter Jessie Dipper, who recently completed a UK tour supporting Scouting for Girls. As is often the case for lesser-known artists, Jessie had to raise her own funds to join the tour, and we were delighted that we could help her seize this opportunity. We talked about songwriting as hospitality, putting others first, and growing in collaboration.
We love to support artists of faith simply trying to make an honest living in the messy world of the creative industries. Join our Patrons scheme for as little as £5 / month – and we can keep supporting great artists like Jessie as they progress.
Hi Jessie. Who are you and what do you do?
Hey, I’m a folk-grunge rock singer-songwriter and performer. I live in Wales, play guitar and write songs!
What one song in your back catalogue best sums you up as an artist? (And why?)
I released a song called Little Miss London on my latest album Sticky Floors and to this day is one of my favourite released songs to date. It was written on the last train out from London back home to where I was living at the time (Birmingham). And I met this incredible woman, who I coined the name ‘Little Miss London’. She had an incredible way of drawing people to her with raucous conversation, and we soon got chatting. We talked about life and the universe with each other and those around us.
It soon became apparent to me that beneath this bravado of bright red lipstick and fur coat, she was a woman quite on her own, and vulnerably still working out what life meant. A week later I finished the song I had begun writing with and about her, and Little Miss London was born. This song sums me up as an artist because I think there’s a Little Miss London in us all – we all dress ourselves up and go about our day hoping people don’t see through us, but beneath it all, we’re vulnerable and questioning, and I have a great hope that kindness is what brings our true selves to the surface, just as this song demonstrates.
You are presently supporting Scouting for Girls on tour and we’re delighted to have been able to support you with some of the tour costs through our patrons scheme. How did this come about and how has the tour gone so far?
The tour came about through some connections I had made over the last few years, through my producer who put me in front of an independent label and bookers. The management of Scouting For Girls saw what I did and were interested In having me on, and thus had an agreement drafted up for me to buy-on to the tour (a common arrangement for up and coming artists).
This was a great commitment to uphold as it required a significant amount of funding, which I chose to crowdfund over the months of July through to September. Incredibly, we were able to hit the target, thanks to everyone who decided to partner with me in supporting this major step. I was so grateful for Sputnik’s contribution, which provided direct financial support in covering additional costs such as accommodation, travel costs and food costs for my team whilst touring the UK. Although we hit a few stumbling blocks along the way, I can say with certainty that we achieved everything we set out to do, and it gives me great hope for my career ahead.
You recently taken on music full time. How have you found that transition? What lessons have you learnt so far?
I’d made the transition before back in 2018, and was able to support myself from then until May 2020 when Covid-19 impacted everyone’s lives. So I’d done it before, but I knew the path was not easy, and it felt like starting all over again. It was a difficult transition to make, but in September 2022 I was finally able to make the move once again back into full time music.
It continues to be an act of faith, to rely on income earned from my work in music to support what I do and increase my capacity for connection. But this was a necessary step. I am convinced that in order to step into this calling of a career in the ‘sticky floor-ed places’, and to achieve a level of success where that career is sustainable, I need to give myself wholeheartedly to it. I’ve had to learn to continually hold things lightly, to not take things too seriously, and surround myself with people that I can trust and will get the job done. Even when a decision seems to be easy, it doesn’t always mean it’s the right one, and thus the discernment process for this is of absolute importance.
This term we’ve given a grant to Amanda Aiken, an illustrator based in the Scottish borders. Having worked on features, short films, and TV shows, Amanda is looking to develop her skills from a storyboard artist into a story artist — a role where pure visuals and sheer imagination helps to form the key beats from which a story and script develops. We talked about that difference, and her ambitions for her own project, ‘The Wait’.
Hello! I’m a storyboard artist, primarily in animation. I also animate at times. I’ve worked on feature films, TV shows, commercials – all kinds of things! I’m also a voracious reader, doodler, dog owner, Aunt to a lovely niece and nephew, and notebook collector. I still have all my notebooks of doodles and stories, some from before I went to school.
As a storyboard artist I take a script and draw panels from it, outlining the story of the show/movie before it reaches the animation stage. This results in an animatic, a video of drawn panels with music and dialogue that’s used as a guide for the rest of the project. I enjoy my work but I’d like to move more into the area of a story artist. Rather than starting with a script, story artists create the whole story and its visuals. It’s the story creation rather than the drawing that’s my favourite part of the job.
Storyboarding is a bit like getting to direct but with far less pressure and responsibility. I can choose camera angles and influence the emotion of a scene. If something isn’t working out, there are times I can even make changes to the overall story.
You are presently working on a graphic novel and we are delighted to be able to support this through our patrons scheme. What is this project about?
I occasionally write short stories—it’s a good way to bring an idea to fruition more quickly!—and these sometimes develop into storyboards or short films. These stories are usually a response to something that’s happened to me, or that I’m frustrated about. Often the stories are best left as the written word, or forgotten about altogether, but with The Wait I decided I wanted to draw it as a short comic/graphic novel. Living as a Christian has caused a lot of people to challenge me why I wait for God in certain areas. The story, though not about the Christian faith, is about waiting, and the challenge of doing so when everyone around you questions why you wait.
Because my drawings are generally loose and rough a lot of my artistic ‘challenges’ to myself are to create finished pieces. Several years ago I illustrated another short story, Kinsey’s Sword, which can now be purchased online. The process of roughing out the illustrations was great fun. Designing the characters and refining the illustrations to a place I was happy with was, at times, torturous. Yet I was proud and pleased with the result and meant to make something similar again; unfortunately I’m an excellent procrastinator and I kept putting it off.
With The Wait I knew it would be an even greater challenge as I’d have to design a much larger cast of characters and locations as well as settling on a finished look. That’s why I’ve had the rough of the graphic novel sitting in a folder for well over a year! So I decided to ask Sputnik for funding to set aside time to research and draw the character designs. I also plan to use some of the money for print samples, as I’d like the final story to be published in print and online.
What do you think are most important features of a good story? What kind of stories do you most enjoy telling?
What I’m always wondering, whether I’m reading or watching a movie or writing or drawing, is whether the actions that are taking place make sense. It’s not whether I would react in the same way, it’s whether a decision is odd for a character. If I don’t believe a character could have made that choice, then nobody else will either.
There are many other things that make up good stories but what I’m seeking to do is to satisfy the audience in some way. That could be by either fulfilling or frustrating expectations. To do this, I create for myself. What do I want to see happen? What happens if that goes as expected? What if it doesn’t? I note my own reactions and dive deeper into the most interesting and satisfying threads that are uncovered. Sometimes these things might only interest me, but that’s what’s most important. The stories I’ve written and drawn have one main thing in common: they’re stories I want to read or see.
I lean to the fantastical and magical, but I’ve always enjoyed juxtaposing that with reality. The ideas in my notebooks are wide-ranging. I don’t overlook any of them because they don’t fit with a preferred theme. Instead, I consider how solid the overall idea is and how strongly it takes hold of me.
This term we’ve given a grant to the musical family trio known as the Moses Brothers: Davidson, Emmanuel and Richard. Although prolific creators, little of their music has made its way to the wider public – until now! We were delighted to be part of their journey to release multiple projects this year, and so we chatted about their process, and what it’s like to grow up in a household with instruments always at your fingertips.
So, who are the Moses Brothers and how did you come to make such beautiful music together?
So kind of you. We are the Moses Brothers, and we are in fact related as we all have the same mum and dad. We started playing music and writing songs at a young age, alongside each other — so as you can imagine, there is a shared musical history, having spent some formative years exploring our craft together. We’re still learning, and growing, and it’s incredibly kind of you to consider our music as beautiful.
Growing up, we were blessed to have parents and also friends, Paul and Kath Sollitt, who saw music in us and gave us our first instruments including a guitar and an upright piano. They saw music in us before we even saw it in ourselves. Because of their generosity, we now play multiple instruments, write, produce, engineer and mix songs!
Through our patrons scheme, we are supporting you in completing a new album. Can you tell us more about this?
We already have 7 songs in the ‘part one’ version of our album entitled Sunrise. There are songs on this such as How Could I Forget that were formed in a dream when Davidson was 9 years old. The next album or project is a continuation of that, and hopefully shows a small side of God’s love and creativity. And we hope to release more projects this half of 2023. This album will be an independent release were we record, mix and write the album as brothers together.
This project is, in part, being produced in connection with Mental Wellbeing Services. Do you specifically make music as music therapy and does making music in a wellbeing context change the way you work?
Although Sunrise explores themes of mental health, there is another project that could be produced in connection with Mental Wellbeing Services. This is a 3-piece instrumental single with our talented friend Caleb Hakim on electric guitar, Rich on cello and Davidson on grand piano. We have received many words about our music being healing to people. “He is healer (Jehova Rapha)” — we hold onto these words.
This term we’ve given a grant to American-born, Edinburgh-based musician Rachel Zylstra, thanks to our amazing community of Sputnik Patrons. Rachel’s piano-led folk songs wear their heart on their sleeve, and form an important part of her life and emotional journey – as she shares here. We had a great chat about the development of her craft, and the role of music in our lives.
Hi! Yes, I can try. Stream of consciousness list… I’m a child of the Midwest (US), former theatre nerd, former (?) actual nerd, former didn’t-call-myself-a hipster, folksy artsy type, friend, wife, mom, daughter, sister, music-maker, bargain-hunter, improviser, procrastinator, ENFP, lover of God, and there but for the grace of God go I.
You have a new EP coming out and we’re delighted to be supporting this through our patron scheme. What can we expect from the new project?
I am delighted and grateful for your patronage! My albums have often been produced on a 5-7 year lag from when bulk of the material was actually written, and this one follows trend. When I moved temporarily to Scotland in 2016, my life was about to change big-time but I didn’t know it yet. This new project will be an EP of 6 piano-and-vocal-led songs written in the 2 years following that move, during which I traversed through making friends with solitude, making human friends, job-seeking, a bad relationship, a last break-up, falling in love, and then learning how to be married… not a new season’s turning so much as a new season exploding.
These songs are partial documentation of that era and I’m excited to finally get them realized onto a record, alongside other albums reflecting other times of life.
Your music often seems to reflect transitions and seasons in your own life. How much do you make music to help you process your own experiences and how much do you create with the audience in mind?
For this answer, I’ll exempt music created for the church, which is another passion and takes a different approach. My personal music making is usually, for better or worse, personal processing: articulating my perspective to myself, and trying to create beauty and suss out the meaning even in the mundane or more regrettable parts of my story. I’ve not veered away from this habit very often in 20+ years of writing songs.
What I have found is that when you’ve written genuinely and specifically about your own heart’s experiences, failings, and fulfillments, listeners who get it, get it. They’ll respond. There are listeners who will hear their own story told, will strip away your specifics and subconsciously fill in their own details as they listen, and in that feel not alone, feel understood. This is one of the joys of being what I call a ‘confessional’ singer-songwriter. When it happens, it’s always a gift.
You’ve been doing this for a while now and clearly have considerable experience as a songwriter, recording artist and performer. What 3 pieces of advice would you give to any young songwriters or musicians who are just getting started?
One: Don’t compare yourself to other artists’ timelines or speedier routes to exposure. I felt like I was behind even in my early 20s. If I hadn’t had a catch-up mentality so early on, I would have taken a breath, a class or two, workshopped my songs more frequently, chosen more meaningful networking (ie, with people and in settings I cared about, rather than just what was dictated to me as “the thing/event/website all young artists must flock to”), and spent more time preparing myself to be my own best advocate for my music.
Two: This advice might be a bit dated, as social media and its related self-promotion was not yet a thing when I was starting out, but… Don’t wait around passively for someone powerful and influential to take you under their wing, get you on track, sign you, roll you out and give you that “big break.” Just slowly do the work, build on your creativity, keep learning, treat any new listener with care, and listen to what trusted, supportive people close to you are saying. In the course of my day job I spent the better part of my 20s brushing elbows with entertainment execs in high places. In turn, there were a few years during which, as soon as someone with big industry connections gave my music notice, I would give their input too much sway, and I would wait months for their next 10-minute morsel of advice, before making a next move in my music journey. At the time, waiting seemed wiser and more demure than forging a less trod path on my own and risking missteps. But, there’s a cost of delay, and there’s a cost to letting your, say, 4th life-priority item be handled at the pace of someone else’s 40th priority.
Three: Yes, social media is fairly unavoidable if you want to thoroughly promote your music. But, for your soul and your well-being’s sake, if you create primarily with a social media audience and virality in mind, it will not be sustainable, and it will suffer from a lack of sturdiness and lack of depth. It amazes me how much time and energy can go into maintaining a surface presentation, and in turn to just “giving people more of what they want” or becoming a slave to narcissistic habit. I’ll admit this advice is not sexy – clearly there is some fame and wealth to be found in harnessing social media algorithms. But fellow Christian artists, preserving your sense of worthiness and sense of self as determined through Jesus; protecting your real-life relationships; preserving your hedge of privacy and a modicum of separation between your personal life and your artist work-product: I do believe refusing to lay yourself down at the social media altar will, in the long term, positively impact you, your art and your best ability to inspire others.
Thanks to our community of Patrons, we helped abstract painter Angelina Ritchie-Smith to take part in a London exhibition. Although an experienced illustrator and designer, Angelina took up the paintbrush in lockdown—and hasn’t looked back since.
I’m Angelina, a wife and also a mother to a strong-willed beautiful 4-year-old girl named Halcyon. I’m an Australian who moved to the UK 10 years ago.
I am a self-taught abstract artist, only having begun my art journey in early 2021. It was because of Halcyon. We were painting stick figures and green giraffes. I am a woman of purpose so I thought, why don’t I get my own canvas and paint beside her. I thought I couldn’t paint until then. Sure, I’m trained in fashion design and graphic design and am also an illustrator but I didn’t know how to paint… it turns out I was trying to paint faces and landscapes which I’m no good at!
Until now it’s been part-time, as my daughter has only been in nursery part-time. Now she’s in school full-time, I am focusing on my art a bit more.
Through our patrons scheme, we are supporting you in an upcoming exhibition you are part of. Can you tell us more about this?
Sputnik helped me to participate in an exhibition in London recently, where I was an honorary prize winner from last year’s competition: the Holly Bush Emerging Female Painter prize.
I won the Tim May memorial award within last year’s prize, yet because of lockdown restrictions, we never held the exhibition—I only received my award via Zoom. So with this year’s competition, although my entry only reached the longlisting stage, I was allowed to have my painting Wonder in the exhibition.
It was so nice to meet last year’s prize winners, as well as this year’s too. The Holly Bush art prize champions women artists and I think there was about 11 awards within last year’s prize. In 2021, I was lucky enough to gain a £1,500 cash prize which helped to fund my art further.
Wonder was inspired by the song Wonder by Hillsong as it made me imagine what the creation of the world was like. The energy of the spoken word. I imagine it being full of electricity, excitement and power.
Your use of colour is striking in your work. You obviously care about colour! Do you think that God cares about colour too? What do you think we can learn from the colours he has built into our experience of reality?
Don’t get me wrong, black is powerful too, and the use of monochrome in paintings can still be beautiful. But when vibrant colours are used (especially gold… I’m kind of obsessed. I don’t know why, it just seems magical), it becomes therapy. I love colour theory and the meaning behind it. I paint for my moods, blue when I need some calm, bright yellow when I’m feeling optimistic and excited and so on.
Yes, God made us in His image and if He can make something as awesome as the earth and all of the galaxies, then certainly we were born to create too… yes, even the non-creative people (they just do it in a different, more analytical way). I guess He wants to teach us to take time for inner care. If we are constantly serving and working, we burn ourselves out. Besides worship, He wants us to literally stand in awe of the creation as it benefits us and our health.
Abstract art is an artform that is often seen to place the meaning very much in the eye of the beholder. Do you try to communicate in your work and if so, how?
Sometimes I intentionally set out with a theme in mind before I paint, eg: Wonder, Joy around being happy etc. Other times I just want to create but I don’t know what or why. I just start to paint. Later it actually helps me to understand what I was feeling eg: passion or calmness etc. It’s like a dancer, sometimes they can plan a routine but sometimes it’s the most improvised pieces that are the most beautiful.
Thanks to our community of Patrons, we’re helping to fund a research project by typewriter artist India Johnson. One of her inspirations is Dom Sylvester Houédard – a monk, theologian, and concrete poet. India discovered that DSH’s archive of work had recently been transferred to the exact town where she lives – giving her the unique opportunity to delve into his work first-hand, and produce her own artworks in response.
In graduate school, one of my professors took us to study some early christian books in libraries in Chicago. They were some of the oldest and most beautiful manuscripts I’ve handled, written in Greek. Handling a prayer book from the middle ages can be a very intimate and meaningful experience, even if you can’t read the text. Touching these precious, ancient devotional books prompted me to shift my focus from bookbinding to making contemporary pieces. I wanted to make work that echoed the experience of holding a sacred book in your hands.
I work with delicate materials, mostly paper and cloth, to create sculptures, books, and textiles–often with christian texts. Throughout the pandemic, I’ve mostly been working with text from the Book of Common Prayer, which was compiled during a plague. I also like to work with the King James translation of the Psalms. It’s the first example of blank verse (poetry without rhyme or meter) in English. My work visits and re-visits these canonical texts because mystical and spiritual experiences happen both despite and within established social structures.
I prefer to exhibit my work in settings where it can be handled; mostly churches and libraries. How much of reading is touch?
We are delighted to be supporting you on your new project through our patrons scheme. Can you talk us through it?
Many of my pieces use a process for running cloth through a typewriter. The artist who most directly inspires this work is Dom Sylvester Houédard (abbreviated as ‘dsh’). He was a Benedictine monk and a poet. dsh is best known for a body of intricate, abstract typewriter art produced from the 1940s to 70s. When I first looked into dsh’s work, all image credits pointed to a private collection, the Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry. I decided to plan a visit–and discovered the collectors had just donated the entire archive to the university in the town where I live. What are the chances? It felt like more than a coincidence. Sputnik is funding a few months of research sessions with Dom Sylvester’s papers, which include beautiful examples of his typewriter art, as well as some correspondence and scholarly writing. I’ll be producing artwork in response to Dom Sylvester’s archive; the medium will be typewriter on textile.
Dom Sylvester sounds like a fascinating man. What drew you to him for this project?
When I first started making typewriter art, I would be at the machine for hours, typing the same fragment of text over and over again. Even though I was working with familiar texts, like the psalms, through all the repetition, the language would become totally abstract for me. More abstract than I knew words could be – being something rather than meaning something. I really came to understand prayer first and foremost as an experience of language. Dom Sylvester’s typestracts show how language can become a thing in itself. When we push words past what they mean, past signification, we come to understand something about the relationship between embodiment and transcendence. One thing that’s become clear since starting my research is that the typestracts are generally smaller than I thought they would be. The paper is very light–almost translucent, but not quite. The typestracts feel so delicate and intimate and focused; they’re a wonder.
Hi Nigel. You’ve had a long journey balancing music with your career. Could you take us through that?
I trained as a medical doctor but have always had a musical career of sorts; it has often felt like a juggling act, or plate spinning. I’ve played the classical guitar since my teenage years. During the 1990s I performed with other guitarists, and then in a ‘band’ with a vocalist, a flute player and a violinist. We received good reviews and made some waves in the classical guitar world, but the economics of it wasn’t viable.
Financial pressures, and the lack of an obvious way forward, meant I went back to full time medical work—and for almost 20 years I played acoustic guitar in various worship bands in churches in London and Birmingham. I also started to write songs, and performed them locally. Then, in 2013, reorganisation within the NHS meant I was offered retirement and I couldn’t resist.
In 2014 I picked up the classical guitar for the first time in 17 years. My playing was awful… at first. Since then, I’ve performed a few concerts every year with classical guitar buddies from around the UK. In 2019 I decided to promote myself as a soloist—then Covid happened!
Through our Patrons scheme, we are supporting your new musical project. Can you tell us a bit about it?
Just before Lockdown, I became involved with Ash and Anji Barker’s Newbigin House project in Winson Green. This is a church-driven urban regeneration project, based on innovative principles which I admire greatly. In March 2020 (oh dear!) we were given a church building, and despite the Pandemic the project has flourished—partly because Ash and Anji are amazing people—but also through the resilience of local Winson Green people, who are taking ownership for regeneration projects in their community.
One of those projects was started by my friend Sarah, with whom I’d run a choir called Rock the Yurt in the autumn of 2019. Sarah’s new project was for a band with Mindfulness at its core—appropriately called ‘MindFunk’. The band has a mutually supportive ethos with a ‘collective’ approach to writing, and we’ve received a good response so far. Everyone involved in the band would have had some experience of mental health services in the past, or present.
The next stage is to record these songs and complete others. We have been fortunate to have been given a lot of recording and PA equipment and space at Lodge Road Community Church to convert into a recording studio. With the money becoming available from Sputnik and others we will able to purchase recording equipment to plug any gaps (this is currently being reviewed) and consideration is also being given to external technical and/or artistic support. This may be worth investing money in, though this would be decided in keeping with the urban regeneration model being applied and any support commissioned would be used to develop the skills of locally based individuals as an investment in the future.
How do you think that art generally (and music specifically) can help those of us who battle with mental health problems?
Time and again individuals in MindFunk express their appreciation of the time spent rehearsing and collaborating in the band and the beneficial effect this has on their mental well-being, something I also echo.
It is especially true if we have a very creative songwriting session, but I have also seen and experienced it when we quickly play through and learn a cover version. We all struggle to keep our emotions centred on a positive outlook for life, and involvement with music is very healing. I’ve also seen how MindFunk spontaneously can ‘give this away’ to others. One incident comes to mind: we rehearse in a building where there is also a community cafe running, and MindFunk can be heard in the next room. A few of the regulars who were in the cafe opened the glass doors and we did (I think) ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s door’, then someone started ‘Amazing Grace’. MindFunk picked it up and the atmosphere in the place became electric. MindFunk is not the church worship band, but what happened then was very worshipful and happened in a very public space. It was magical, and I have no doubt very healing for those involved.
Christians are often keen to serve their communities as an expression of Jesus’ command to love our neighbours. However, this service is usually seen in practical terms. How do you think that art can express God’s love for our communities and do you have any advice on how you think artists or churches can serve their communities more effectively through the arts?
I passionately believe in art for art’s sake; our God is by nature creative, and since we are created in his image, we are creative beings. This creativity is in all of us, but this world seems to do everything it can to squeeze it out of us. I believe that is because our creativity is a powerful antidote to the destructive forces so often expressed in our communities.
My model of creativity is that it is involved in the engine room which powers the practical outworking of God’s purposes; not an add-on when we can afford it, but part of the ‘currency’ which invests in the ‘Divine economy’. An economy which values and invests in the arts is likely to be an economy which will grow in a beneficial way, a less destructive way; perhaps even a way which respects people and the environments in which they live. Effective practical projects are more likely if they reflect and arise from a more creative culture.
A film producer, documentary director and more, with his roots in youth work, Pip Piper is one of those people who helps community-building to happen. Thanks to our community of Patrons, we’re giving funding towards Pip’s new local film festival in his new hometown of Exmouth.
A healthy arts culture is a common good, allowing the emotional and spiritual life of a community to flourish. It’s part of how we connect, dream, and aspire, together. Why not support work like Pip’s, by joining our Patrons scheme for as little as £5 / month? Find out more here: https://sptnk.co.uk/patrons
Hi Pip. For those who haven’t come across you yet, can you introduce yourself?
Hi, yes! I am Pip Piper, an indie film maker with about 25 years of filming experience across commercial, feature drama and feature documentary. I produce and direct.
I also helped set up (mid 1990s) and still run OSBD media charity that helps develop young emerging filmmaking talent and creates films that matter. For 15 years I also co-directed Blue Hippo Media Ltd with Rob Taylor. I was based in Birmingham for 30+ years, and now am based in Exmouth, Devon. I am married to Debbie, who also helps run OSBD and we have 3 grown up boys.
You are setting up a film festival in your community in Exmouth. It’s a great pleasure to be able to support this great project through our patrons scheme. Can you fill us in on the plan?
Thank you for the support—it’s not just the finances, but more importantly the support and belief that comes with it that really counts. Debbie and I plan to develop a film festival in the town that brings together people who want to be involved, ultimately aimed at local residents (Exmouth is a town of over 40,000).
We are going to start small, and build over the next few years. It will be a cultural and curated festival, not so much about competition but more about bringing really interesting films to the town, with Q&As and events aimed at enabling wider engagement. The ethos will be about community development and cohesion through the artform of film. We also want to have a short film challenge for young filmmakers built-in too. We aim to run our first pilot one in November 2022.
Why do you think that this is important? Why do you think that Exmouth needs a film festival?
Well, it doesn’t have one and we don’t think ever has! Seriously though, as mentioned above, we believe that art can bring people together, break down barriers, help build cohesion and has the possibility to inspire and inform. Film really can do this—help us laugh, feel, be inspired, get angry. A festival of films both short and feature, fiction and documentary, peppered with guest Q&As and events could bring something very special to Exmouth and its community and beyond.
You have a long track record of bringing ambitious projects like this to life. What advice would you give others who would like to set up large scale community arts projects like this one?
I think take your time, talk to lots of people, do the groundwork. Who are the people already doing things that you can collaborate with, or learn from? Run your SWOT analysis. Then start slowly and begin, ready to adapt as you evaluate.
Ultimately though, you will need to own what you want to achieve, and look to make a way. Have a trusted team you can bounce ideas off and listen to when it gets tough. Share the load—no need to be the hero. For us who are followers of Jesus, this is all Kingdom building; so pray, listen, discern, be wise and trust Him.
Through our Patrons Scheme, we support Christians who are making engaging, powerful art or who are using their skills to serve their local communities.This term, we’re funding a very personal music project by songwriter and filmmaker Ben Lawrence.
Hi, I’m Ben a musician and filmmaker from Norwich. I’ve been creating since I was a teenager and love to communicate my journey through the films and songs I make. I’ve been married to Mel for seven years and spend my days working for Norwich Youth for Christ and St Thomas Norwich as a creative.
It’s a pleasure to be able to help fund your latest project. Can you talk us through it?
O Wide World is my first solo release, a collection of songs written about grief, hope and re-finding adventure. In 2016, my twin brother Dan passed away from a brain tumour and these songs are my story of journeying through the grief.
I started writing some of these songs only a month or so after Dan died, but it wasn’t until early 2021 that I thought about actually doing something with them. I felt the call to pursue them and started working on demos. The demos really helped me to develop my sound and after a few conversations with producers and friends, I decided that it was about time I made an album.
This album is set out in three acts that will take the listener on a journey through my story and the process of grief. Act One is all about memories, nostalgia and the longing to be back with the ones we’ve lost and in those places we treasured as kids. Act Two is an honest look at grief, anger, loss and abandonment. It’s the rawest section of the album. Act Three focuses on hope, moving forward and finding purpose in the wake of loss.
I’m working with a great producer, Iain Hutchison, to fully realise the potential of these songs and a great team of musicians and creatives. It’s extremely exciting to bring so many great people together in this project.
My aim is that this album will really connect with those who’ve experienced something similar and anyone who needs some hope. The album will have 12-13 tracks and will be accompanied by a documentary and music videos.
So sorry to hear about your brother. How has the project helped you to process the grief that you’ve felt in your bereavement?
I’ve always written songs as a cathartic way to deal with what I’m going through. I never thought I’d be writing about this stuff, but in some ways I’m glad I have this creative outlet to help process. I’ve always wanted to help others, it’s why I’ve felt called to work in Christian ministry areas for the entirety of my career, and so this album is important to me for two reasons. Firstly, it’s a tribute to my brother, who was an inspiring passionate man of God and it’s a chance to help others on their journey too. It feels good to make something positive out of such hard circumstances.
I take each day as it comes with grief. Some days you just carry on and other days you need a bit more time to gather yourself. These songs have been a soundtrack for me throughout all of those days and I hope they’ll be special to other people too.
You seem to have a very thought through plan for the project, including a very successful Kickstarter to help gather extra funding. Can you provide any tips on how to set up a successful Kickstarter?
This is my first crowdfunding campaign and I was adamant that to do it well, I needed to put the hard work in. Gladly my friend Pete McAllen (aka Pyramid Park) gave me lots of insight and helped me understand the best way to go about it.
We knew it would be very important to tell the story as best as we could, so we spent a long time developing the main campaign video and filming several sections to it to really show the breadth of what we wanted to achieve. I am so appreciative of Sarah Ballard and Ben Lambert, who have both helped me out immensely in all of these areas.
I had a full marketing campaign ready to go to aid the 35 day Kicsktarter and this really helped to keep the project in people’s minds. I’ve never been so busy, but it was so rewarding as the total kept ticking up. There were a few moments where I was sceptical that we would reach our £10,000 target, but thankfully we made and exceeded it!
The total album project is actually more like £20,000, so I’m very grateful to Sputnik for their extra funding, which will really help us make this album the best it possibly can be.
Thanks to our community of Patrons, we’re funding a nature-inspired musical album written by Newcastle-based artist Lydia Hiorns. As well as being the Director of Shieldfield Art Works, Lydia explores embodied hospitality through her KILN project, and makes prints, drawings and songs to explore the created world.
Hello, I am an artist living and working in Newcastle. Within my artistic activities I explore embodied hospitality. I create spaces and host events that enable conversations about hospitality. Currently this occurs in KILN tent, a hand printed portable space where I host meals and conversations to grow a more critical understanding of hospitality (making room for another) and commensality (being together around a table) within the public and private sectors. This is needed within society to develop a genuine culture of ‘hospitality as a way of life’ rather than something that we do.
I also make prints, drawings and write songs to explore the created world and how we interact with and care for it. You can find out more on my artist website and KILN website. I am also the Director of Shieldfield Art Works [SAW], an arts organisation in Shieldfield, Newcastle upon Tyne — an area which has undergone rapid urban development. As a project of the Methodist Church, we seek truth, challenge injustice, engage in social activism, and work for the common good.
Anyone’s welcome to participate in our programme. We believe that art and creativity are integral parts of human life, and, with art’s unique ability to articulate, question, and inquire, we can change our communities and the world. So we develop high quality art exhibitions, events, workshops, conferences and publications based around the issues and interests of our local area.
It’s a pleasure to be able to support your new project. Can you fill everyone in on what you’re planning?
I am going to write and record an album called The Arboretum that will consist of 20 songs about specific individual trees, paired with 20 corresponding tree drawings. I am hoping to collaborate with a selection of musicians to compose and record the songs and I am excited about the diversity this method will create. Once I am done you will be able to enjoy the songs and artwork on Spotify and my website—and you never know, I may get a few CDs made for those who enjoy the physicality of polycarbonate.
The natural world has been the focus of many of the finest artworks ever created but, at the same time, there can be a sense that work about the raw elements of creation can be passé or unadventurous. Why do you think that the natural world is a good focus for artworks and what is it about trees in particular that inspires you?
There is no doubt that nature is often idealised in art as people try to contain it in a neat frame. But nature is messy, dangerous and gloriously reflective of aspects of God’s character. Recently I have been doing a lot of research into trees specifically and I am convinced that trees, and what they teach us, bring great good to our world. They are universal and generous: enabling us to breath, bringing beauty, giving food, allowing us to write, read, sit and walk. Only last month the Woodland Trust gave away 60,000 trees to fight against climate change. Trees are also prevalent throughout the Bible from the tree in Eden, Calvary and heaven. Trees give life, they praise God, they show fruitfulness, they are a conduit for salvation, they display suffering and they describe Jesus.
With that view of trees in mind, I would like this album to inspire awe in the beauty, diversity and complexity of trees; to shine a light on the problem human destruction of trees creates to planet and people; to explore how we can cultivate a mentality of longterm conservation and care for trees like within an arboretum; and to link the gospel to trees, so that whenever a tree or a product of a tree is seen a Christian will remember the gospel and anyone else may start to glimpse Christian truths in the natural world.
In your wider body of work, as you mentioned, you like to explore ‘embodied hospitality’. What is this and how does it play out in your practice?
Embodied hospitality is when you don’t just see hospitality as something that you ‘do’ at given times, like when you invite someone for dinner, but you see it as a way of ‘being’ where your whole life embodies a hospitable nature. We often see it as making a Mary-Berry-worthy Victoria sponge. But it is not entertainment! No, it holds a far deeper importance.
God is hospitality in essence: he created the world, a spacious and gracious space. He welcomed us into it. Jesus came and ate with people. Jesus’s table was one of grace, not reciprocity. It was counter-cultural, and collapsed the distance between rich and poor, insider and outsider. Jesus’s table expressed the Kingdom of God. Hospes means both ‘host’, ‘guest’, or ‘stranger’. So, hospitality is welcoming the stranger.
If hospitality is about making room for others and welcoming, it doesn’t depend on having a nice house and being able to cook a five-course meal. I am so convinced of this that I’ve just written a book to help everyone discover practical ways of offering and accepting hospitality with limited resources, or at the beginning of their hospitality journey.
KILN is the name I have given to my practice/research around hospitality after the Hebrew initials for “All of my heart and soul”. It carries on this idea that our whole life is to embody welcome. For most of my practice I create spaces and host events that enable conversations about hospitality in a hand-printed portable tent.
Finally, my role at SAW of managing the programme naturally puts the host’s apron on me, which is empowering; but something occurs when a guest’s contributions are recognised, and when a guest isn’t defined first as needy. This intrigues and astounds me. Jesus himself was the recipient of hospitality more often than he provided it. He enabled Zacchaeus to be a host, and that’s what transforms him. Christians often take the host roles, but sometimes we need to give others a turn.
Thanks to our community of Patrons, we’re funding a community-driven comedy project headed up by Tom Elliott. Tom is a comedian and magician who’s familiar with the church circuit, but has recently founded ‘The Big Local Night Out’, a network of nationwide community arts projects — no strings attached, just to benefit the scene.Watch our interview with Tom below, or read on for our quick Q&A.
We firmly believe that a thriving arts scene is a common good that blesses many. Why not join us in supporting intrepid performers like Tom, by joining our Patrons scheme for as little as £5 / month? Find out more here: https://sptnk.co.uk/patrons
Hi Tom, can you introduce yourself?
I’m a professional Comedian and Magician and director of Cornerstone Entertainment Ltd.
Having performed everywhere from comedy clubs to cathedrals, I’m passionate about enabling the church to be present amongst its community. Jesus spent a lot of time in the temple, but he also did incredible things in the marketplace. That’s where I want to be. The arts gives me a great opportunity to blend the two.
You’ve largely made your living through touring churches in the past, but you‘re presently looking to transition into working in the mainstream arts space. What is your new project and why have you chosen to take this route?
The Big Local Night Outis a community arts initiative, aiming to help the church be at the forefront of community life. It’s not directly evangelistic, but it does enable relationships to be established and nurtured, connecting with those who perhaps would never step in to an event held within a church building. Combining the professional talent of mainstream musicians with the participation of local choirs and school groups, this series of four events across the year, seeks to increase community cohesion and wellbeing. I’m now pretty confident that we will be launching 5 locations this year, with a vision to expand significantly over the next 10 years.
What lessons have you learnt so far about how your creative skills and faith best work together?
For those of us who have developed our creativity in Christian circles, it can be so easy to stay put and never stretch beyond the four walls of the church.
As I’ve entered into the comedy club scene, I’ve been amazed at the low key but none the less significant conversations I’ve had with other comics about faith. I’ve been so encouraged to read Daniel 1 and trying to live out the same strategy!
“But Daniel purposed in his heart that he would not defile himself with the portion of the king’s delicacies, nor with the wine, which he drank; therefore he requested of the chief of the eunuchs that he might not defile himself.”
“Then the king interviewed them, and among them all none was found like Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah; therefore they served before the king. And in all matters of wisdom and understanding about which the king examined them, he found them ten times better than all the magicians and astrologers who were in all his realm.”
Through our Patrons Scheme, we support Christians who are making engaging, powerful art or who are using their skills to serve their local communities. This term, one of our grants has gone to Birmingham-based printmaker Luke Sewell, aka @lukeprints.
We’ve had the great pleasure of watching Luke’s skills and career develop first-hand, and when he came to us with a new project based around a GK Chesterton poem, we couldn’t resist. You can watch our interview with Luke below, or keep scrolling to read Luke’s deeper thoughts on his journey so far.
Luke:
I’ve been making linocut prints for just over four years. I bought a starter set so that I could design an invitation for my wedding in Christmas 2015, inspired by the work of Sputnik’s own Ben Harris, and by deep and long-buried memories of carving blocks in secondary school.
I dusted off the gouges in 2017 when I was doing a Museum Studies masters at Birmingham School of Art. Most of my fellow students were studying some kind of fine art and I just wanted a simple, embodied process that would give me a creative outlet. My boss at work gave me a smartphone at the same time, which gave me access to plenty of inspiration from contemporary printmakers such as Lou Tonkin, Harry Brockway, Kathleen Neeley and Nick Morley on Instagram. The Kathe Kollwitz retrospective on display at Birmingham’s Ikon Gallery at around the same time was also very formative.
The enforced lockdowns of 2020 and 2021 turned what was a hobby into a vital discipline that filled large amounts of free time, gave me purpose and to my great surprise and pleasure became something that could at least financially sustain the cost of the materials required, with a little change. All of this has occurred in parallel with my almost-ten-year involvement in Sputnik, as art has proved increasingly vital to understanding and practising my faith.
The enforced lockdowns of 2020 and 2021 turned what was a hobby into a vital discipline
The question of what draws me to Tolkien is an enormous one, which I could and probably should write on far more extensively. Tolkien’s friend C.S. Lewis writes about being too old for fairy stories, before eventually being old enough for them again. Over the last couple of years I’ve grown old enough for Tolkien’s work to undergo something of a renaissance, particularly in awakening a desire for the sacramental. The sacramental imagination in Tolkien’s work changes the way you see reality. It makes the world more real. Trees are no longer just trees, nor rocks simply rocks. Bread and wine will never be merely food and drink again. Middle-earth rescues us from the prison of a flat, material world and points us to something higher, nobler, more beautiful – and ultimately true.
He does all of this not through a series of persuasive arguments or essays, but adventures and myths that are participatory, immersive in their consistency, enormous in scale and beautifully sorrowful. Tolkien’s treatment of loss, death, decay, defeat and hope without guarantees has helped me survive the last year after a sudden and devastating bereavement and I believe his perspective is increasingly vital for Christians and Christian artists preoccupied with a sentimental and often shallow positivism.
Tolkein’s treatment of loss, death, decay, defeat and hope without guarantees has helped me survive the last year after a sudden and devastating bereavement
The work I make is only a small symptom of way Tolkien has lifted my focus to the sacramental, to wonder over ideas. Like Saint Gregory of Nyssa said, “Ideas create idols. Only wonder leads to knowing.” Hopefully the work is illuminated by that focus, but I imagine it will take time – much of it so far has been quite a derivative method of meditating on some of the stronger images from Tolkien’s work and tracing where they have come from; Tolkien was an excellent subcreator (to borrow his own invented term), reusing and repurposing ancient images and patterns embedded deep in our collective subconscious to create something that is nevertheless vibrant and alive.
My current work concerns itself with another modern mythic story deeply connected to the soil we find ourselves on (if you, like me, are reading this in England). G.K. Chesterton’s 1911 epic poem The Ballad of the White Horse is about an end to the world, which is a theme I’ve always enjoyed. We are often vain enough to think that the end of our world is the end of the world, but many worlds have come and gone whilst the sun continues to rise. How do we understand our faith if the ending of our world isn’t what ultimately ushers in the Second Coming and the Age to Come?
It’s also about a gathering doom and how we might go about living under that kind of foreboding without knowledge of what the future holds. Much of the time Christian hope seems to be defined by an eschatological certainty of what the future holds, whether that be over the longest, eternal arc or considerably shorter ones if you belong to a tradition that continues to deal out Jeremiah 29:11, or prophetic encouragement of the prosperity that awaits us in the coming season with cheery abandon.
Chesterton outs hope based on certainty of the future as definitively pagan. Christian hope is set apart by the fact that it makes no such assurances about what awaits us, true faith instead being sublimely painted by Saint Mary’s beautiful, mysterious and troubling words to Alfred;
“I tell you naught for your comfort, Yea, naught for your desire, Save that the sky grows darker yet And the sea rises higher.
“Night shall be thrice night over you And heaven an iron cope Do you have joy without a cause, Yea, faith without a hope?
My wife Emily and I have recently welcomed our first child into the world; a son called Edmund. As we collectively face a future of climate breakdown, the dying throes of a deeply flawed economic structure, transhumanism and increasing political authoritarianism, how do I reckon with the decision to bring a life into such a world, a defiantly hopeful act that a good friend described as “the badass opposite of suicide”? How do we partake of the joy of giants; the joy without a cause?
I don’t know. But The Ballad of the White Horse at least encourages us to explore the question. It does so with wit, some stunningly beautiful use of the English language and the sense that it will require more from us, the Church, than the belief that God will make the bad and uncomfortable things go away if only we pray and believe hard enough.
If that onslaught of wisdom wasn’t enough for you, you can follow Luke at @lukeprints.Why not join us in supporting fantastic artists like Luke, by joining our Patrons scheme for as little as £5 / month? Find out more right here on our website.
Through our Patrons Scheme, we support Christians who are making engaging, powerful art or who are using their skills to serve their local communities. This term, one of our grants has gone to Joanna Karselis, a multi-instrumentalist, composer, and singer-songwriter.
Joanna has been a friend of Sputnik’s for some time, through our Birmingham Hub, and we’ve greatly enjoyed following her work, seeing her talent and perseverance pay off. We were delighted to be able to help fund her upcoming EP—and even more so given the story behind it. We’ll let Joanna explain.
Hi Jo. You’ve been involved in Sputnik for several years now but for those who are not familiar with your work, could you fill us in on who you are and what you do?
I’m a multi-instrumentalist and composer. I mainly work in film music, but I also score games, plays, podcasts, adverts… anything that needs music! I also write and sing songs, and work as a session musician and music educator.
Your main field of work in the last few years has been in media music, particularly film. Can you talk us through this? How did you get into making music for film and how has this developed?
I started off studying classical violin performance but through some convoluted and unexpected circumstances ended up doing a master’s degree in contemporary classical composition. During my masters I got disenchanted with the state of musical academia and increasingly felt like I didn’t fit in there. I didn’t write the “right” kind of music for most of my professors and wasn’t given the same opportunities as the other person in my year (it was a small course!)
Thankfully, one kind professor gave me the chance to score my first play, which completely realigned my goals as a composer. Shortly after that, I got my first job scoring a feature film, after the director happened to find my work online. My music wasn’t deemed worthy enough for the classical world, but it worked pretty well alongside a visual image. After a successful festival run for that film, I was expecting the work to start flooding in, but it ended up taking another two years for me to get another credit as the industry is so competitive.
Since then it’s often felt like tough going, and if I’m being honest it’s not an easy career path, but through persistence and patience I’m now in regular employment as a film composer. I’ve scored three films on Amazon Prime, mixed music at Warner Brothers, spent the last few years on BAFTA’s talent development programme, and have scored many award-winning films, so that hard work is starting to pay off.
Even though it’s been a tough journey, I’ve persisted with film scoring because it’s my calling. God loves telling stories, and when I score a film, I get to support the narrative by adding depth and fullness to it through the music. I’m a passionate believer in cinema as an agent of change, so being part of telling these stories that help us understand each other and challenge our perceptions and understandings of the world is really important. Often the composing process feels very worshipful for me and I really connect with God as I do it. I also get to be a woman in a male dominated industry, which brings with it challenges but also opportunities to advocate for equality and fairness and to support my peers, and to do my best to treat everyone I encounter with grace and kindness, which isn’t always the industry standard.
It is a pleasure to be able to support your latest project through the Sputnik Patrons Scheme. Can you talk us through it?
In late September 2020 I became suddenly ill. It eventually turned out to be long Covid which started after an asymptomatic initial infection. It’s an illness I’m still living with now.
The first three months were particularly rough, and for that time I became bedbound and only able to carry out the most basic of everyday tasks. Despite that, I kept a pad of manuscript paper by my bed and every few weeks I had enough energy to do some basic composing. I wrote these little snatches of upbeat and uplifting piano pieces that would bring me joy, as well as capture the pain of the pandemic and my own illness.
In January I started being able to sit up in bed for an hour a day with my laptop and a mini-keyboard, and I began slowly inputting these pieces into my computer. The project has really kept me going through the last year, gradually expanding as I’ve been able to work again and to do things I took for granted before like record myself playing violin. It’s now a fully-fledged EP.
It feels like the most personal and worshipful thing I’ve ever made — I can’t even listen to some tracks without breaking down — and the Sputnik funding allowed me to go and record the piano parts in a studio which felt like drawing the beginning of a line under the experiences of the last fifteen months of illness. It’s a big departure, as I normally either release film music or songs; so to release something that’s neither, feels like I’m reclaiming my own music and letting it stand by itself for the first time in many years.
To stay connected with Joanna Karselis and her work in the lead up to the release, you can follow her on Instagram or Twitter, or check out her website. To hear a bit more about her journey, you can watch our longer interview below!
Through our Patrons Scheme, we support Christians who are making engaging, powerful art or who are using their skills to serve their local communities. This year thanks to our community of Patrons, we helped to fund a new EP from Birmingham rapper Kapes A. Witness.
Kapes has been plying his trade in his local scene for a good few years. Now finding himself on a journey of faith, he’s working out in real time how the worlds of faith and art overlap, how his motivations have changed and what he hopes to achieve through his art.
Hey Kapes, introduce yourself…
Hey, I’m Kapes A. Witness. I’m a Birmingham-based hip-hop artist. I started rapping in 1998, aged 10. I went on to perform around the UK, including at Birmingham’s O2 Academy. I also collaborated with brother of 2pac and Thug Life co-founder, Mopreme Shakur. In 2015 I became a born-again Christian and since then, faith has been at the forefront of my music.
Who are your main influences?
Growing up I was influenced by rappers from the 80’s and 90’s. 2pac was the biggest influence on me overall. There was a lot of passion and emotion in his music. Since becoming a Christian though, my attention was drawn more to those with the same mission as me. Now I listen to people like Bryann Trejo (who I was blessed enough to collaborate with), Bizzle, Datin, Kurtis Hoppie, Young Bro and KJ-52 to name a few.
One of our Kapes favourites at Sputnik HQ is ‘Story to Tell’. One of the striking features about your music, as demonstrated on this track, is your ability to be able to tell your story authentically and honestly, not shying away from your ongoing struggles or your relationship with Jesus. How do you find this balance?
My music is always an honest reflection of my life, so sometimes you will hear that struggle—but you will also hear the victory that comes with having friends in high heavenly places! Jesus has transformed my life and who I am as a person so much. He tells us to cast our cares onto him, so that’s what I do and the music reflects that.
It’s a pleasure to be able to help you with your latest project through the Sputnik Patrons Scheme. Can you talk us through the new project?
I’m so excited about working with you guys on this project! You can expect some joyful noise, some deep story telling, fire beats and as we wake up each day in a new chapter of revelation; some eye opening, sign of the times bars! Stay tuned!
To stay connected with Kapes A. Witness in the lead up to the release, you can follow him on Facebook or Twitter. To hear a bit more about his journey, you can watch our longer interview below!
Through our Patrons Scheme, we support Christians who are making engaging, powerful art or who are using their skills to serve their local communities. This term, one of our grants has gone to Stewart Garry, an instrumental fingerstyle guitarist from Newcastle.
We’ve long been fans of Stew’s work, as a great example of non-verbal music which can still evoke a powerful sense of place, emotion or story. The music is both technically daunting and yet easy to enjoy; and supporting the studio recording of his new (as yet untitled) album was a no-brainer.
Introduce yourself Stew. Who are you and what do you do?
Hi Sputnik! My name is Stew, I’m 32 years old; I’m married to Abi and we have a daughter, born last year, called Brooke.
We’re currently located in Cambridge, having moved from the East Midlands a little over a year ago for me to start working as an Assistant Pastor at a church here. Alongside being a Pastor, I am studying Biblical Counselling with BCUK (Biblical Counselling UK). Outside of church life I compose instrumental acoustic guitar music. This music uses modern fingerstyle guitar methods such as using the body of the guitar as a drum, tapping melodies or chords and alternate tunings. For my compositions I often like to take influences from my Celtic roots as well as film, alternative, jazz, and heavier music.
Those who’ve been around Sputnik for a while may well be familiar with your work through your excellent ‘Sojourner’ album. It’s hard to believe that was 5 years ago. What have you been up to in the meantime?
After Sojourner, I got married and spent most of my time involved in church work and studying for an MA in Christian Ministry. However, I did get the opportunity to compose some music for a couple of friends weddings, play some cool gigs like the London Acoustic Guitar Show, and teach a few fingerstyle guitar “masterclasses” (their term not mine) at Nexus ICA.
The new album was written in lockdown just after the birth of your first child. Could you talk us through the process?
The process of writing this new album during lockdown and after the birth of my first child has been a lot different to any other album that I have composed—for a few reasons—but the main one has been that time off work with my family just inspired me.
I’ve heard lots of musicians say they didn’t want to pick up their instrument during lockdown, and I understand that, but with being a dad for the first time and having such a crazy year, I felt like I had something to say again after all those years since Sojourner. A second interesting factor has been not being able to gig. In the past, it was during performing that I would try new material out, see what lands well—or not! So this time, it’s been a longer process of listening back to my work on my own. The main result of these things has been that the music is less complicated but more melodic. It feels more of a personal album rather than abstract music written about places and good times, which at times I think Sojourner became…
I know that in your music, you like to think very carefully about the recording process and also how to present your music visually. How are you planning to record and release this project?
Many instrumental guitarists release videos of their music on a plain background, so everyone can see that it’s really just them playing all the parts! Whilst there is nothing wrong with that, I do like people to have more of a visual experience as well. Since I’m now situated in Cambridge, my thoughts have been around finding interesting places to film, such as old libraries, perhaps even King’s College… but this part of the project is still in its planning stages. The first part is to get into the studio in November and get the music sorted. This is my first studio-based album since The West Coastover ten years ago, and so there are some nerves going into the studio again—but it should be fun. I am also looking forward to collaborating with Joanna Karselis again. Jo and I worked together for one of the tracks on Sojourner (called Patience is a Virtue), and I was thrilled that she was up for working together again on a track called A Scottish Lament. Expect lots of trills.
To stay connected with Stewart Garry and his music in the lead up to the release, you can follow him on Instagram, subscribe on YouTube, or follow him on Spotify.To find out a bit more about his work and process, you can check out our longer interview with him below!
Through our Patrons Scheme, we support Christians who are making engaging, powerful art or who are using their skills to serve their local communities.
This term, one of our grants has gone to Jill Woods, an installation artist. We caught up with Jill to find out about more about her journey and her latest installation.
HI Jill. Could you give us a bit of introduction to your art journey?
It’s been a ‘long and winding road’! I loved art at school, but dropped it to do science subjects at A level and then went on to do a science degree.
Throughout university, I continued to make things – clothes, cards and gifts for family and friends. That approach continued for many years – just dabbling and enjoying exploring my creativity, visiting art galleries and learning about other artists. I did a number of workshops, mainly involving textile techniques, and I was part of a creative group with friends taking a creative approach to the meditative practice of Lectio Divina.
I explored doing an Art Foundation course when my two children were small, but it wasn’t the right time. It wasn’t until 2018 that I finally felt it was a good time to push the door. I managed to get in to my local college (at 54, I was the grandma of the group) and I absolutely loved my time on the course. I was really drawn to installation art for the potential it has to be multi-sensory and participatory, and to the use of light and shadow in exploring ideas of spirituality.
I wanted to carry on by doing an undergraduate degree, but I could only get funding for an MA, so I leapfrogged into a part-time MA in Textile Practices at Huddersfield University where I continued to explore light as a medium within installation art.
We were delighted to be able support you recently, through the Sputnik Patrons Scheme, for your piece at the LIGHT:space exhibition in Stockton. Firstly, can you tell us about the exhibition itself.
The exhibition was developed by Wild Vision Collective, a group of 4 artists who had come together at the beginning of the pandemic to encourage each other. They had a desire to reach out prophetically to speak hope to the community of Stockton using art. Following on from a successful Pop-up Gallery in one of the empty shops in the Wellington Square shopping centre, they proposed a light trail using more of the empty shops. This would be COVID-safe as visitors would be outside looking in and social distancing could be observed. Their proposal was accepted, they obtained a small amount of funding from the local Arts Centre and the LIGHT:space Art Trail was born. I heard about it through their Curatorspace open call.
So, what about your piece in the exhibition? Talk us through it.
This was the very first time I had exhibited because there had been no end of year show, so I was really excited and nervous. My piece is called ‘The Light Shines in the Darkness’ and it is based on the final piece I did for my MA, adapted for the window space I was given. It uses light and reflective materials, stitch and wire knit to encourage a meditative experience for viewers. As well as using light as a medium, I am interested in the structure of DNA and chromosomes and the role they play in the structure of life and identity.
The piece consists of multiple stitched floor-to-ceiling hangings made from silver mylar and dichroic film strips, loosely based on a stylised DNA molecule. There are also tubular pieces of knitted stainless steel wire to represent the banded appearance of chromosomes. The hangings are lit so that the reflections created are captured on the walls, ceiling and floor and these move in the air currents created by a fan. To me, coming from a faith perspective, this speaks of how the light of God illuminates us and makes us each unique like the reflections created – we are not just the result of our DNA because God takes what we are and makes something wonderful. The title comes from the opening verses of John’s gospel which I felt were appropriate for the time in which I was working during the COVID pandemic. I am very grateful for the funding I received from the Sputnik Patrons Scheme which has enabled me to purchase new lighting to replace the battery-powered lighting I had used originally and improves the sustainability of the work.
Through our Patrons Scheme, we support Christians who are making engaging, powerful art or who are using their skills to serve their local communities. This term, one of our grants has gone to Matshidiso, a singer-songwriter based in London.
Influenced by the folk-jazz of Nina Simone and the neo-soul stylings of Robert Glasper amongst others, Matshidiso’s music has a freewheeling, naturalistic feel with storytelling at its core. It’s beautiful, theatrical, and all held together by Matshidiso’s stunning voice. It has been a pleasure to connect with her over the past year, and we’ve loved getting acquainted with her work – and we reckon you will too.
For those who haven’t come across you yet, can you introduce yourself?
Hi there! My name is Matshidiso (pronounced Mat-Sea-Dee-So – a South African name – from the Setswana and Sotho tribes – meaning blessing or consolation). I’m half South African, half Jamaican and born and raised in London.
I’m a piano player, composer, arranger, producer, singer, teacher (and now a podcaster!) – but mostly I would call myself a songwriter. I love the way you can have an idea in your head, hear the instruments, visualise the story behind the song, add words to it and then watch it come to life with other musicians – it’s one of the most magical things for me about making music. I suppose it mirrors creation and what God did – He had an idea and spoke it in to being – we get to do mini versions of that through our own creativity.
I started playing the piano at 7, but actually (to cut a very long story short) trained as a human rights lawyer/barrister before switching to a full time career in music. I started writing songs during my undergrad Law degree, writing songs in the safety of my living room – so many I’ve lost count. Then in 2012 I chose music full time – it was one of those moments when you realise you only have one life so you might as well really live it.
I’m still passionate about social justice (I do stuff in prisons, internationally, work around racial justice) and I reconcile the 2 sides of me this way – I use creativity to promote social justice.
Is there a song that particularly sums up your work?
I often say about my music that I write about 2 things – love and justice, which really is about 1 thing – love. I wrote a song called Fragile which is about love and whilst it doesn’t ‘sum up my work’ musically because we’re always evolving, it is the essence of what I’m passionate about in terms of the words:
‘Love in our hands is broken, love in our hands is worn, blurred the lines of it and twisted its form – fragile. I have stolen and I’ve been stolen from, left his heart for the birds, exposed to the sun, he was fragile. I have known love where I could barely breathe to look into his eyes as he looked inside of me, we were fragile’.
You’re working on a new album and we’re so pleased that, through our Patrons Scheme, we’ve been able to help that come closer to completion. Can you talk us through the album and how it’s progressing?
Sure – and thanks so much for helping to make it a reality!
This has been a real journey. It starts around 2017 when I put a new band together, and we would gig my songs and they would naturally evolve with the venue, the audience, the band set up (we’re a 7-piece: me on piano and lead vocals, then bass, drums, saxophone, guitar, 2 backing vocals). People would often ask for the recordings of these songs after our gigs and I didn’t have them!
Alongside this, I had written 3 songs that I considered a trilogy and I envisioned a series of short films, one for each song that comprising singular but interconnected narratives expressed through different dance styles (ballet, hip-hop, contemporary dance), and all shot in South Africa. So in 2019, I headed to South Africa and started working with a team to bring these songs to life – we shot 1 out of 3 of the videos – a song called ‘Glean’. (See images and video from the process here).
Back to the album. At the end of 2019, I started working with my drummer on arranging these songs we’d spent 2 years playing for the album. We would record the album and also properly record the trilogy of songs for my South African films. We had planned to start recording in April 2020 – well, as we all know the pandemic happened! We managed to record one track that was released in July 2020 on March 12th a week before lockdown in the UK – called ‘Quiet Love’.
We managed to get back into the studio for a week in August where we recorded the majority of the songs – all the instruments and guide tracks for the vocals. And here’s the thing with recording: 1 – it usually takes longer than you think and 2 – when you listen back to things you realise what needs work, re-recording etc. So since August, I’ve been going to the studio in the evenings to record vocals, re-work some tracks and do overdubs. We did that with the electric guitar – my original guitarist tore a tendon in his hand so was out of action – fortunately I had another guitarist who spent 5 hours one Wednesday over Zoom doing it!
Your Patrons Scheme has allowed me to pay that guitarist (who is amazing!), to mix and master Glean so that we can edit the South African film, and it’s also gone towards studio time to continue recording vocals.
The album is on its way – one of the things I’m very conscious about is creating an album that has an arc, a narrative that makes sense all the way through. That was thanks to a great conversation I had on my podcast, Holding up the Ladder, with Prince’s former sound engineer, Dr Susan Rogers. She was explaining how Prince would record his albums and it really was so instructional for me! If you’re a musician or a Prince-lover you should listen to it here.
So I’m currently finishing the tracks I already recorded and writing and arranging new materials – it’s like pushing out a very big baby! But I think it will be worth it and Sputnik’s Patron Scheme has been instrumental (excuse the pun!) to the journey, so thank you very much!
Through our Patrons Scheme, we support Christians who are making engaging, powerful art or who are using their skills to serve their local communities. This term, one of our grants has gone to Christy Ringrose, a Scottish-Norwegian singer-songwriter now living in Edinburgh.
Christy Ringrose is something of a creative dynamo: a painter, songwriter, podcaster, and the leader of our Edinburgh Sputnik Hub. As a musician, her rustic, intimate style contains traces of folk, jazz and musical theatre – and a good dose of the unexpected.
We were delighted to be able to support Christy through our Sputnik Patrons scheme, by helping her to stage her first online concert, on 12th June. We caught up with Christy to talk a little more about her artistic journey:
I grew up in Norway with a love for music, art and nature. Although I loved creating art, I didn’t believe that I was talented enough to become a professional artist. But when I moved to Scotland to study languages, I could no longer subdue my creative drive: I attended art courses, studied painting in an artist’s studio, wrote stories, performed in a French theatre group and finally discovered my biggest passion – songwriting. I signed up to an MA in Songwriting and Performance at the University of the West of Scotland, and that was the beginning of a new life as a musician.
Do your painting and songwriting harmoniously feed into each other or battle against each other for space in your life? How does one artistic discipline serve the other or does it not work like that?
I made a decision to focus on music rather than painting, because of how it enables you to connect with people so instantly. A song automatically demands attention, invites participation and changes the atmosphere in a room. I love the physicality of singing.
Having both painting and songwriting just give me more options. For example, writing a song takes quite a lot of complex thought, but with painting I can just paint something I find beautiful, get lost in the subject and not have to finalise what I’m trying to say.
We’re so pleased to have helped fund your first online live concert on 12th June, and we’re really looking forward to it. How are you finding the challenges and opportunities presented by this new platform? And how can people get tickets?
Not having the audience in the room is a challenge which has to be overcome by imagination! On the 12th of June I will be performing some songs from my first album Dancing Without Space, but also some brand new songs that I have written during the pandemic which will make their debuts.
Singer-songwriter Rachel Zylstra grew up in the American Midwest, but now calls Edinburgh her home, and her piano-led, naturalistic folk songs feel like they carry the hallmarks of both. Often they sound like they couldn’t be performed by anyone else, with swinging cadences and such easy, conversational delivery that you’re surprised these songs didn’t just fall out of the air fully-formed. It’s the kind of sleight-of-hand you expect from Rufus Wainwright, or Regina Spektor, and it’s remarkably hard to do well: but Rachel pulls it off with charm to spare.
At the start of the year, Rachel released ‘On Faith’, a new collection of more outwardly ‘sacred’ songs, that marks her first release in a few years. We chatted to Rachel to find out more about her musical journey, and how the various turns of her life have influenced her writing and outlook.
Would there be one song that you felt best summed up your music? Can you talk us through it?
Sure! Most of my songs have one or two of the lyrical themes below, but one of my faves that immediately comes to mind, has a whole tick list of them all in one place: ‘The Pity Party’ (from Strings, 2012)
Wistfulness
Self-deprecating humor
Mild wallowing
Tough love (“Stop your quivering, you giant little mouse”)
Pep-talking (“You’ve got the chance to make it up again as you go along”)
Romantic love/Anxiety about finding love (“Shield me from the blow… of being not enough to merit the inventions of someone I could love”)
God/Spiritual longing – i.e. knowing that, after all these dramatrics, it’s actually very much Not About Me (“Point me to the thing that makes me full”).
Musically, it’s my ‘classic’ sound: ballady, classical-influenced piano and a conversational vocal delivery; a touch of theatre; added to this, the sound gets souped up as it goes along with swoopy strings and some vocal counterpoint – brushing with chaos, but coming back, much like the arc of the lyrics.
Your latest album On Faith is the first you’ve released since moving continents. How has relocation affected how you approach your art?
Over the course of a decade living in NYC, I’d grown some strong ties in Christian and arts community. I had talented and generous musician friends who came on board to make music with me in different seasons, venues I knew I could always play. When I moved to test the waters in Edinburgh, I literally knew two people, so starting from square one connection-wise was the first challenge.
But, my relocation to Scotland was kicked off by a hopeful whim and a decision to nourish my personal life. As to how it would enhance my art and art production, I was pretty sure that spending time on the wistful windswept landscape would inspire some new beautiful-sadness type lyrics, but I didn’t think far beyond that.
I tend to write from an autobiographical perspective more often than not. So when (surprise!) a bunch started changing in my personal life after I moved, my personal life became a big distraction away from my regular art-making patterns, and also changed some of the themes that I felt inspired by and equipped to write about empathetically.
On top of that, you’ve recently had your first child. I know that many artists find it very difficult to juggle their art and the responsibilities that appear on becoming a new parent. How’s it going so far?
While I love being a mom, carving out the necessary time, energy, mental and physical space to create and rehearse with a toddler in tow, especially in a lockdown, especially while lacking access to a studio or equivalent – is a plain good joke! Seriously though, since my daughter was born, we’ve lived in a small 1-bed flat. We intend to move to a 2-bed soon, and I think I’ve already hung too much hopeful expectation on an extra room in the house and how it could “solve” these mental and physical space issues!
It’s fascinating to see the way your faith interacts with your music. On Faith is certainly more upfront in its Biblical subject matter and more explicitly worshipful than previous albums. What led you in this direction and what have you learnt so far about how following Jesus and making beautiful music can go together well?
Making On Faith actually wasn’t a sudden turn in direction, but the result of the accumulation of a number of Scripture songs and hymns that I’d penned or adopted over the years, sung in churches, etc, some of which had become all-out mantras for me in my faith walk (e.g. ‘Dayenu Lord’, written by Steffon Davis). My earliest original song on On Faith, ‘World Belongs’, dates back to 2000, and the most recent to 2018. These are years through which I was writing and putting out albums of my more ‘mainstream’ heartache/hope/humour-infused singer-songwriter fare, all the while thinking, “Someday I’ll do a full-on sacred/Scripture songs album.” So, in part it came down to practicalities – I didn’t dare try to stick a bombastically worshipful song like ‘Psalm 65’ on a track list next to a song pining for an ex-boyfriend – though, I’m sure some have succeeded at this level of diversity on a record!
Making On Faith… I guess if I dig deeper to answer the “why now?” question – why not have made it 5, 10 years ago? – I am reminded of the trajectory of my faith and life circumstances. My late 20s and into my 30s I was growing in disillusionment – initially, in not achieving a commercial success with my art that I had really hoped for and pursued; then, in longing for marriage, while simply not meeting that person. My faith took a big nose dive in my early 30s and spiritual/existential doubt became a major theme in my songs then. The Tacit Turn (2015) reflects this period. I felt “held” through that season, and ultimately, brought back from the agnostic edge, but I wasn’t singing from a place of spiritual strength, rather of deep vulnerability. Granted, God meets us in deep vulnerability…
When I came to Scotland in 2016 on a wing and a prayer and a visitor’s visa, and within the three years that followed, fell in love, got married, and had a baby – I was kind of bludgeoned by the evidence that God is there, and listens. God listened to my prayers and my heartaches and my longings, was with me through a long desert of waiting, and finally answered, “Here you go, Rachel” and showered me with all these ‘Yes’-es.
So, when my daughter was 6 months old and my new-parent feet felt more firmly planted underneath me, I asked: what’s next on the musical agenda? – and the project that has become On Faith budged its way to the top of my consciousness. I didn’t question it hugely then; I figured – hey it’s just time to get this one out. But I see now that it was a response. I had to respond explicitly to what God had just done in my life, and give all the glory where it’s due. I felt in a stronger place to do it, and to mean it with all my heart. Even if my faith-feeling still ebbs and flows at times, my life shows God’s outrageous provision and love, undeniably, in spite of me.
Devon-based musician Michael Dornan has released the first instalment of his new ‘Flora & Fauna’ project, a self-produced effort recorded at home during the pandemic, featuring all manner of remote collaborations.
We sent Michael some questions to fill us in on the project, his journey so far and the inspirations behind his quirky brand of nature-inspired indie-folk.
Can you talk us through your journey as a musician so far?
Well, when I was a kid I learned so much at the old upright piano at home. It had been my grandpa’s – he was a music teacher, choirmaster, accompanied silent movies – and I’d listen to the TV or radio and try to recreate what I heard. It was a little imaginative refuge.
And later, still in County Antrim, I got loads of experience with a female-fronted classic-rock-for-Jesus band. Being the main songwriter and not the singer, I had to be pretty adaptable – and though I go out of my way to not publicise that stuff now, I did develop my chops there. But my biggest influences were solo artists: Stevie Wonder, Brian Wilson, Joanna Newsom. Later in Oxford, I found my voice composition-wise with an amazing band, Praxis Bold. Kinda indie-jazz-folk, so we called it in-j-oke.
You’ve made music in a variety of contexts, from being in bands with people who aren’t Christians, through to music more solely focused on a church audience. What have you learnt from those experiences? Where would you say you fit best?
When I find out where I fit, I’ll let you know! There are so many nuances in this question, I’m glad you dig into the spiritual stuff at Sputnik. As a reader/listener, I love artists who create a little world that I can briefly visit, after which I look at my own world slightly differently. That’s what I want to do. And if I were to fence off my work to all but one group of people, as I once unintentionally did, then I’m not using my abilities to the full. Back to Stevie and Brian – from them I learned that if you have love in you, you put it into every note of every song. That’s what I’ve tried to do with this new record.
As a solo artist, you seem to collaborate very effectively. What advice would you give singer songwriters who have a strong vision for what they want to do who find that they cannot pull it off on their own?
Still thinking of creative partnerships extra ecclesiam, we all had really different views and tastes in Praxis Bold. One night we swapped instruments – bassist on keys, me on bass, which I’m not native to – and we came up with probably our best song ever, from outside our comfort zones. A live staple that remains sadly unreleased. Another time I brought something I’d written, and no-one trashed it, but after a session the guys agreed, “this doesn’t sound like Praxis Bold”. That’s a marvel – we were discovering the character of an entity bigger than ourselves.
It’s different as a solo artist. Instead of a Venn diagram of overlapping interests, you have a circle! So anything goes, but to feel alive you still need the oxygen of community. That’s been harder to come by since Covid. I was going to meet up with a couple of the Praxis guys last March, but… you know what happened in March. So with a new record in the pipeline, I went back to my drawing-board, and decided that with the help of some session musicians, I could make something quite kaleidoscopic from home.
So we have beautiful sounds from violinist Joanna Karselis, a film composer in her own right, but gracious enough to work with the skronky scores I suggested to her; some awesome upright bass from Madalena Graca, who I found online and thought – she’ll vibe with this weird song I have. The key is seeking out people you trust to interpret your ideas with their own hands.
If you had to put music in one of the following categories, which would it be: fun, work, calling?
It’s all of the above at different times, but let me put it like this: if I didn’t have the sense of calling, it would’ve slotted comfortably into the category of “fun” by now.
What does success look like to you?
That’s a little like ‘what does health look like to you’ – a question my wife’s been writing about recently. In both cases, I’d probably say staying active enough to keep going for the long run. I’d lost a lot of momentum because I didn’t do that. I didn’t do that because I had to go away and reimagine myself. Success comes when you’re engaging with people – ideas are shared, or feet start moving, or someone’s sufficiently moved to throw fruit at you.
The new project seems to have been a long time gestating, but by the sounds of it, is coming on great. Can you talk us through it?
Thanks for that. This album is called Flora and Fauna, and is broadly a project about creativity and nature. On the creativity front, the song I mentioned with upright bass is about seeking inspiration – it’s based on a baroque piece by Henry Purcell. The album also has a bit of an obsession with St Cecilia (patron saint of music). And in the past year, little corners of nature have given us all the inspiration we’ve needed, in our daily escapes from home. So there are songs about that small-scale magic, including one about the first time I saw kingfishers, which changed my life.
Of course, trees, insects, they all live great lives without human interaction. I’ve tried to make sure my own voice isn’t the only one involved. On Flora and Fauna there are field recordings I made of birdsong, and a software percussion instrument made only from sounds (wood on wood) I could make in a Bristol forest. And joyously, Emma my wife sings lead on a few tracks. The thing with the biological world is, it’s so diverse I can’t have only a few different sounds on here. Trumpets, synths, crickets at Land’s End – I wanted them all to be part of it.
The first half of ‘Flora and Fauna’ is out now on Bandcamp! Keep your eyes peeled for an upcoming Kickstarter to help finish the project and fund printed copies. Follow Michael’s progress on Instagram or Twitter.
Social pressures are a recurring theme for author Chibundu Onuzo; unsurprising, you might say, considering she was the youngest female author to be signed by Faber & Faber, aged 19. That debut novel, The Spider King’s Daughter, was published two years later, and went on to win a Betty Trask Award.
Chibundu has described the experience as overwhelming, making her follow-up that much harder to write. Nonetheless, the ensemble novel Welcome to Lagos gathered critical acclaim, drawing on her childhood years in Nigeria while managing to show a nuanced, challenging, entertaining and hilarious range of human experience.
Faith is a notable feature of Welcome to Lagos, but so is injustice, inequality, and the social pressures that meet successful young women. “[Lagos] is not a place you can romanticise,” Chibundu has said, but one of the most intriguing aspects of the novel is an optimism about human nature, and our ability to better ourselves. Its Afrocentrism and the roundedness of her characters has put her at the forefront of a movement towards decolonising our literary scene, breaking old stereotypes and re-presenting the Nigerian diaspora in their full, human complexity.
Ironically, Chibundu was raised on British classics – eg. Great Expectations, Pride & Prejudice etc – and only read Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart after moving to an English boarding school at 14. “When I meet other African writers now we talk about sharing this feeling that our lives were provincial and the white experience was universal,” she says. “We felt that the world was happening elsewhere.” If the next generations of young authors feel differently, it will be thanks to the likes of Chibundu Onuzo.
Don’t miss Chibundo Onuzo in our brand new ‘Spotlight On..’ series in 2021 – with a live talk and Q&A discussing her journey and practice. Get tickets here!
Professional illustrator David Doran has an unmissable, iconic style, influenced by – among other things – travel posters of the early 20th Century, traditional printing techniques, and modern painters from Rothko to Matisse.
Doran lives and works in Falmouth, where he shares a studio with his brother (painter Jon Doran, who we recently featured in our first Sputnik anthology) – having graduated from Falmouth Uni in 2014, turning a few heads in the process. While his work has kept its hand-drawn charm since those early days, it’s quickly developed to include digital methods too, resulting in devastatingly clean, impactful visuals.
Illustration is hardly an easy field to break into, but Doran has quickly racked up an impressive resumé of clients, from The New Yorker to BAFTA, with editorials, book covers, and agency campaigns; while still finding time for his own personal projects on the side. His multi-tasking abilities may boggle the mind, but his success is not so surprising, given the quality of the work. David’s illustrations give credence to the old adage that a picture is worth a thousand words: they have undeniable communicative power, grabbing the eye and expressing a mood in one swift delivery.
Don’t miss David Doran kicking off our brand new ‘Spotlight On..’ series in 2021 – with a live talk and Q&A discussing his journey and practice. Get tickets here!
Chris Gaisie, a.k.a. Mr Ekow, has long been a Sputnik favourite, both for his musical output and his tenacity, determination and creativity.
At Sputnik Patrons we’re incredibly proud to have supported the video production of Mr Ekow’s new single, I Am Hip Hop – a no-holds barred demonstration of the man’s serious lyrical skill. For the video, Ekow and director Matt Bowie recreate a whole ton of classic hip-hop videos, from Missy Elliot to the Pharcyde, to Dizzee Rascal, to Tyler the Creator – placing Mr Ekow in the pantheon of hip-hop greats with gravitas and goofy humour in equal parts.
It’s a killer video, and we highly recommend you watch the whole thing below and go support Mr Ekow’s music.
Filmmaker Pip Piper’s most recent documentary, ‘Long and Winding Road’, had its premiere last week at London’s Bush Hall. We were able to invite some of our Patrons and Hub members along; London Hub leader Alex Dickens was won over by its immersive, humble portrayal of the industry…
Q&A at the Long and Winding Road Premiere. L-R: Adrian Utley (Portishead), Sybil Bell (Founder, IVW), Philip Selway (Radiohead), Nadine Shah, Pip Piper, Dom Frazer (Owner, The Boileroom), Steve Lamacq (Radio 6)
There’s a humming and persistent bed of sound running through Long and Winding Road –Pip Piper’s documentary about venues at the heart of local, live music – that will be instantly evocative to any gigging musician.
The twanging impatience of tuning up, the clatter and squeaks of setting up cymbals, the pops and buzzes and the ‘one two one twos’. All the preparation, the nervous excitement; each moment of practice comes to this point. It’s immersive, and apt that we were listening to it through the towering speakers of independent venue Bush Hall, where Amy Winehouse, Adele, REM, and Paul Weller have all passed through on their way to bigger and grander arenas.
However, much like Piper’s first film about the cycle of ruin and renaissance in a the music industry, his second (made in association with Independent Venue Week) is less focused on journeys to stardom, and more interested in those volunteers and professionals who, day in day out, exist on the precipice of survival – both in the spotlight and behind the scenes.
As many of us know, creative arts at the grassroots level is a risky endeavour, and LAWR introduces us to a host of characters, often colourful, whose livelihood or community is entwined inextricably with these small and often beaten-up music venues. Some days the room is bouncing; on others it’s three men and a dog in the corner. Some days you find the next big thing, on others you’re staring down closure because of new developments and noise complaints. It is a lifestyle of ‘smoke and blurred visions’, as it’s poetically described by one venue owner.
The film’s heart and its narrator is Philip Selway. Selway is most commonly found behind the drumkit for Radiohead, but his charming demeanour and talk of family and home comforts belies his pioneering rockstar accomplishments.
In LAWR, he is simply a gig goer, a fan, and is thrust back into the beginnings of a band’s journey as he takes in seven gigs at seven venues in seven days – touring the country with Pip and his team in the back of his van. Though nowadays Radiohead would be rarely found away from the biggest stages, it is immediately clear that Selway has a deep affection for the small and the intimate, as well as acknowledging its place in the ecosystem of new music and new bands.
From iconic and
established independent venues like The
Leadmill in Sheffield or The
Adelphi in Hull (with its curmudgeonly but adored longstanding
owner Paul
Jackson), to newer projects focussed on training and support like
The
Warren or The
Brudenell Social Club, the film’s scale and scope is impressive
as it anchors the stories of these halls and back rooms not in their
successes, but in the everyday people who give their time and money
to serve and champion artists and creatives.
Their greatest accomplishments are often staying open for another month, or creating community where there was none, or seeing the kid that hung around outside train and take on responsibility as a technician.
Yet each story and individual seems to see the spectre of challenge on the horizon; the fact pubs and clubs are closing at record levels, ravaged by developers and legislation and simply dwindling audiences content with consuming music and entertainment on the few square inches of our phone screens. Undeterred, the bands still get onstage, still the ritual of tune-ups starts again, the doors open once more. There is something special inside these spaces, something that cannot be bottled or bought.
What is starkly clear about both Selway, Piper, and the film is that there is a humility and a sincerity in their message. It isn’t overly emotive like a charity appeal, in fact in the post film Q&A hosted by Steve Lamacq, Piper mentions the deliberate decision to leave some of the more emotional elements out of the film. Instead, it gives the majority of its time and its spotlight to those not usually accustomed to it, which in a film with contributions from members of Radiohead, Portishead, Pink Floyd, and artists like Nadine Shah and Richard Hawley, is a noticeable and notable choice. In Piper’s interview with Sputnik he remarks:
“I am not a Christian filmmaker, nor am I a secular one.
“I am a filmmaker, period. I am also a follower of Jesus and that creates a life defining, distinct and deep DNA in who I am and how that outworks in what I do and say and engage with.”
In the film’s championing of community, of mutual support and encouragement, of daring to follow creativity and the ability to try and to fail and then try again, his ‘deep DNA’ is evident, and is evidently displayed through both his technical and storytelling craft.
The passion, drive, energy, and wholehearted belief in the individuals on film leaves you far more uplifted than defeated, and I believe that’s exactly where Piper would want you to be.
At another point in the post-film interview, Pip said the one thing he would want you to feel as the credits roll is ‘Where is my nearest gig venue and when can I go there?’. As I jumped off my bus home through sprawling London streets and walked past a band just taking the stage at my local pub, these words rang in my mind. Why not, I thought, and I entered the cacophony of tune-ups, mic checks, smoke and blurred visions once more.
I became friends with Huw Evans in a rather strange way.
In 2014, I had the bright idea of compiling an anthology of writing from people in the Catalyst network of churches. It was an open submission project, and after getting word out, submissions started to come in. It was only then that I realised that I had a problem: I didn’t really know anything about poems or short stories. How on earth was I going to work out which ones should go in and which ones shouldn’t?
While thinking this
through, I received a series of poems that even I could tell were of
a particularly high calibre. I decided to take the plunge. I replied
to the poet to congratulate him that we would love to feature his
poems in the anthology, but also to ask him whether he’d kindly be
the editor for the entire project. Amazingly, he agreed!
That poet was Huw
Evans.
From that point, Huw became Sputnik’s writing guy. He edited another anthology the following year, and featured in a number of other Sputnik events and publications. He also provided valuable informal feedback to writers across the network as well as coaching both of our Sputnik interns, Tanya and Jess. On top of all of this, Huw became my friend.
In late 2017, Huw was
diagnosed with terminal cancer and in March 2019, he died. He is
sorely missed.
Huw had much wisdom to
share, but the piece that has shaped me the most was maybe the
simplest. Just turn up.
We can get ourselves in
such a fuss about how to create, different techniques and methods,
but so often the thing that stops us doing anything is that we don’t
do anything. If you ever asked Huw how you could get better at
whatever art form you were practising in, his response would be the
same: just turn up. Just put in the hours. Just write. Just draw.
Just paint. Just perform. Just keep doing it over and over again,
until you start to get good.
Huw had much wisdom to share, but the piece that has shaped me the most is the simplest: just turn up.
He lived this out. As a
young man with a desire to write poetry but not a lot of spare time,
he decided to set aside 2 hours every Saturday, from 11-1, to write.
It didn’t matter if he felt like it or not, if he felt inspired or
not- he would close himself in his room, so he told me, and write.
When his four kids got
a bit older and he had a bit more breathing space, he did a creative
writing Masters, but it was the disciplined ‘just turning up’
that had kept the candle burning, so that he could really hone his
craft with more concentrated focus when the time came.
Huw Evans’ Minor Monuments
And like an experienced runner, when he knew that his race was coming to an end, he put all those years of ‘just turning up’ into practice and ended with a sprint regarding his creative output. Since his diagnosis, he published a poetry anthology (Minor Monuments) and a children’s novel (The Goblin of the East Hill) with other works still likely to surface.
The psalmist writes in
Psalm 139:16 ‘All the days ordained for me were written in your
book before one of them came to be.’
I really wish God had
given him a few more, but Huw was a man who used those days very,
very well. He loved Jesus, loved his natural family and was
faithfully committed to serving his church family and he has left
behind a body of work and a body of wisdom that will go on for many
more days yet.
In a sense, he has
passed the baton on to us.
Huw Evans performing Not Long Now
Thank you, Huw, for the inspiration and encouragement, and for introducing me to RG Collingwood, and for being the only over 50 year old I could have a meaningful conversation with about Aesop Rock and Homeboy Sandman, and for being the first person to perform a sex poem at the Catalyst Festival, and for ‘just turning up’ both to your writing desk and to your church when almost everyone else in our family of churches was choosing one or the other.
Alongside the poetry and novels, in Huw’s creative purple patch of his last years, he also wrote and staged a one man show, Not Long Now, which was his response to his cancer diagnosis and the drastic shortening of his life expectancy that came with it.
I saw a preview of the show at the Catalyst Festival 2018, but after that, Huw honed the show further, and officially premiered it at Shilbottle Community Hall in November 2018. Fortunately for us, he produced a video of this performance, and whether you knew Huw or not, I’d thoroughly recommend putting aside an hour and giving it a watch. It will do you good.
Anna O’Brien of Face to Face Storytellers is a professional Storyteller and works in educational and community settings delivering dynamic performances and workshops both for adults and children. She is fascinated by the power of stories for transformational change.
Introduce yourself: Who are you and what do you do?
My name is Anna and I’ve been working as a Storyteller for nearly 20 years now. Yes, it’s a real job! There couldn’t be a better one! I deliver storytelling performances of traditional folk tales in all sorts of educational and community settings. I also deliver workshops to groups of children and adults, helping them to devise stories and work on their delivery skills.
What do you think makes a great story? What makes a great Storyteller?
I recently read a book called The Seven Basic Plots, that suggests there are only 7 story plots that have been told throughout all the world and all through history; and the reason for this is that there is a subconscious truth that we are all linked to, which is telling a universal story. The author of the book (Christopher Booker) had his own explanations for this, based on the theories of Carl Jung, but my interpretation is that our Creator is a Storyteller and has wired us all to communicate in stories. Each of the 7 plots – for example, rags to riches, defeating the monster, the quest, the tragedy – can all be found in the great story of love, rebellion and redemption between God and Man.
So, all good stories, in my opinion, must have elements of this God–Man story as its underlying truth, so that it resonates with our spirits, and makes us want to pass the story on.
Anna O’Brien performing with Face to Face Storytellers
You recently received a Sputnik grant to train you in something called Theraplay. What is this? How have you used this training so far in your practice and how do you intend to develop this in the future?
I am so excited that I’ve been introduced to Theraplay® and am so grateful that I was able to attend the Group Theraplay training in September. The training course was excellent and it totally clicked and made sense to me.
Theraplay is a theory and practice of relationship-based play. When used one-to-one by a fully trained therapist, it can be such a healing tool in a young person’s life and help deal with very deep-seated, attachment-based issues. When used in a group setting it can increase self-esteem and a sense of well-being; it can help us to create stronger and healthier relationships with others. I have been trained to use Theraplay to inform all my work in group settings.
“I hope to keep bringing Theraplay into all my practices, to create groups that are warm, friendly, and empowering.”
I have begun practising what I have learnt in a surprising number of settings: with parents and pre-schoolers, Stay and Plays and nurseries, and also with primary school children and Play Workers; even with adult groups in workshop settings. There is much to learn, and I have become part of a local Peer Support Group run by a Certified Theraplay Therapist in Birmingham which has already proved really fruitful.
I hope to keep bringing Theraplay into all my practices, to create groups that are warm, friendly, and empowering to be a part of. I would love, in time, to run courses for parents and their children, to help parents to enjoy and have fun with their children, and lead them well. I am learning all of these things too, and finding it so helpful in my own parenting journey.
Storytelling and Theraplay go so well together because they are both about face-to-face interaction with the person or people in front of you; they are both about how to give and how you receive; they are both very live, improvisational and playful!
For many Christians, Kanye West’s new album Jesus is King is the perfect example of a piece of Christian art. It is wholesome, uplifting and features the highest quality of craftsmanship, but most importantly, its content is unapologetically, relentlessly and worshipfully Christian.
Therefore, I was not surprised to stumble across some responses to Jesus is King putting it forward as evidence that Christian artists should be much more confident in proclaiming Christ through their art and not shying away from filling their work with explicitly Christian content . It seems like an open and shut case. Kanye West can top the charts with an album of simple gospel proclamation, so why are other Christian artists so reluctant to do so? I mean, what else could you want to make art about?
I may sound a bit contrarian, but I’m not so sure. While I appreciate the need to proclaim Christ, I think that pressuring artists to do so in their work shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what art is, as well as a confusion over why Jesus is King is shifting so many units among people who are not Christians.
Art as a vehicle for
our message?
A very common Christian view of the arts is that they are primarily valuable as a vehicle for our message. Art, in whatever from it might take, has a powerful communicative power, and we have a message that we are very keen to communicate, so – this view goes – if only we could use this aspect of human culture more proficiently, it would maximise our evangelistic effectiveness.
This seems well intentioned but also somewhat naïve. I
would, of course, agree that art has a powerful communicative power. I recently
heard art described as a Trojan horse. Its ‘emotional charge’ (as philosopher
RG Collingwood put it) opens the doors of your attention and possibly
affection, and before you know it, you are considering and probably warming to
beliefs, opinions and maybe even entire worldviews that you wouldn’t have given
the time of day to otherwise.
In a world saturated with marketing and advertising, people are getting more and more suspicious of manipulative techniques.
However, while all of this is true about how art affects people, it is probably an unhelpful way to view art generally. If you set about making art with this in mind, you will probably end up producing propaganda. One of the problems with this is that in a world saturated with marketing and advertising, people are getting more and more suspicious of such techniques. This means that art produced in this way can actually have the opposite effect, and if people feel their emotions being pulled in a certain direction by a piece of art, they instinctively bolt the gates – not just to that piece of work, but to the group it speaks for.
In any discipline, art made with an obvious agenda is
usually well received by those who are already on board with that agenda, but
it is resisted and even resented by those who are not.
Engaging in a
conversation through the arts
Art, I think, should be viewed more as a way of entering into a conversation. It involves speaking one’s mind, but it also involves listening. In a conversation, subtleties of body language and tone of voice are key; in art, nuance, empathy and vulnerability are necessary. Importantly, art works are rarely viewed in isolation, but are part of a process, involving an artist’s whole body of work, and even his or her life as a whole.
The typical Christian approach to evangelistic art is to
treat it as a megaphone to raise the volume of our message in individual
outbursts. We interrupt what everyone else is talking about, shout something
about Jesus, then run off. This is not a very winsome way to approach the art
of conversation and it is an equally poor way of approaching art as
conversation.
Now, let’s consider Jesus is King in this context. Musically, it is very polished, and in places I think inspired. Lyrically, it is very simple and blunt. Some think of this as a strength, others as a weakness, but the fact that people are thinking about it at all shows that people have willingly entered into the conversation with Kanye. The reason for this is quite simple: he has put time into participating in this particular conversation and, for all his antics, has proved himself a highly engaging conversationalist.
Since his earliest releases, he has exhibited a fan-boy enthusiasm for hip-hop culture and a love for the art form. This has earnt him a listening from those within his specific discipline. On top of this, although he is infamous for saying and doing things that are, let’s say, a little bit off the wall, his tendency to fill his music with exactly what he is thinking at any particular moment has meant that people feel like they have some sort of connection with him, and – most importantly – that they relate to him.
We interrupt what everyone else is talking about, shout something about Jesus, then run off. This is not a very winsome way to approach the art of conversation
This means that Jesus is King, in the context of the conversation, is not the simple (even possibly simplistic) work that it appears to be, taken purely on its own merit. It is an unexpected (although not entirely out of character) left-turn on a journey that many people are already heavily invested in.
If Jesus is King
was Kanye’s first album, it would not be trending worldwide, just as if Stormzy
had released Blinded by Your Grace as
his first single, he would not have been invited to play at Glastonbury. They
didn’t enter the conversation there, and they probably couldn’t have done.
Expressing yourself
honestly through the arts
Interestingly, Kanye’s approach to art making has remained
fairly consistent throughout his winding career. He has always justified his
media outbursts and the more unsavoury elements of his art, by arguing that it
is his job, as an artist, to express himself; to refuse to pretend and instead
to faithfully represent in his work what is going on in his head.
In the past this has led him to shoot from the hip on
political and social issues and also to unburden the salacious contents of his
id on to his listenership. Now, he has decided to follow Jesus and with the
fresh faced enthusiasm of a new convert, he is continuing in the same vein- he
is being himself. He may well have mixed motives in the whole affair (don’t we
all?) but the interpretation of Jesus isKing that I find least likely is that
it is the product of a calculating mind, trying to tap a certain market. Kanye
has spent years killing his editor, often at great expense to his personal
credibility, so I don’t see why he’d change that particular habit now.
He seems to be making music about Jesus, because, at this
particular moment in time, he loves Jesus. Long may that love continue and
grow!
What can we learn
from Kanye?
When I reflect on Jesus
is King then, I don’t see compelling evidence that Christians should make
art that focuses exclusively on Christian content. It is also not a clarion
call to use the arts to proclaim the gospel. It is instead an encouragement to
Christian artists to join the conversation. To step out of the safety of the
Christian subculture, and become a faithful presence in their artistic cultures.
This will probably only be possible if they are somewhat more diverse in their
content than Kanye is on Jesus is King.
Just to be clear, I am not suggesting that Christian artists
should cunningly hide their allegiance to Christ and pretend to be interested
in other things, until people take the bait and they can reel them in!
Underpinning my understanding of how a Christian should
engage in the arts is the belief that living for Jesus doesn’t mean that we are
only interested in things that are obviously of a Christian nature. By his
light, all things become brighter, and so Christians should be people who are
interested in, and excited about all sorts of elements of life as things that
have been given to us as gifts from God.
The musician and songwriter T Bone Burnett put it brilliantly, when he said:
“If Jesus is the Light of the World, there are two kinds of songs you can write. You can write songs about the light or you can write songs about what you can see from the light. That’s what I try to do.”
Art is a tool by which we can explore the depths of what it
means to be a human being, and, as Christians, we should be able to do that in
the most profound way; in a way that finds many universal points of reference,
but that also authentically and beautifully leads people to the one who is the
true human, the perfect image of God.
By God’s grace (let’s hope) Kanye West has gained a platform
for the gospel by appealing to the more transgressive tastes of the masses.
That’s how he got into the conversation. If you’re a Christian artist, you can’t
do it like that, but in a funny way, Kanye’s model of honesty and openness is
very much something that we should emulate. We should love God and make art
about whatever we will, as Augustine would have said if he’d decided to
contribute to this particular discussion!
Give artists space to make authentic, weird, silly, earnest, abstract work… they will get into conversations with people that you never will
If you are a church leader, then, please do not use ‘Jesus
is King’ as the blueprint of how the Christian artists in your church can now
reach the world with the gospel. Instead train artists up in godliness and give
them space to make authentic, weird, mind boggling, silly, earnest, abstract
work that may seem like a total waste of time to you, but is their way of
processing what is going on in their heads. By doing this, they are likely to
get into conversations with people that you never will.
And for all of us, let’s celebrate what seems to be going on
in Kanye West’s life and also celebrate the existence of an album that is going
to direct millions of people’s attention towards Jesus, when, without it, they
wouldn’t be thinking about him at all.
And, I know I may not take you all with me on this one, but I’m praying that this is his last gospel album. It would be a travesty for a Jesus following Kanye West to be relegated to just being a successful CCM artist!
This article first appeared in a slightly edited form on the ThinkTheology blog.
Jessica Wood: I always find it a weird question when people ask me ‘what kind of poetry do you write?’ I don’t really know how to answer that question, but I’m going to ask you anyway: ‘How would you describe your poetry?’
Tanyaradzwa Chitunhu: I would say it’s Spoken Word poetry. The difference, I think, between spoken word and page poetry is that spoken word is written with the intent of sharing it out loud. It incorporates hip-hop, storytelling, theatre; it is many different elements all at once, but it is intended to be heard out loud. Whereas page poetry is intended be read.
JW: I think with my poetry, you can read it out loud and there’s something to be gained from that, but it takes multiple readings in order to understand it fully.
TC: I think the more accomplished performance poets can walk the line, but there’s an immediacy about performance poetry. I don’t have all day to listen to you, or for me to go over a line multiple times so that you get it. I have to be powerful enough to capture the essence of what I’m trying to tell you.
I think that better poets are able to do that; they put enough work and effort into their craft that even though you can get something in the moment, something else should hit you later. There should be a level of realisation even after the moment is done, but I think that takes a lot of craft and a lot of understanding of how to use the words and the performance to create something bigger than the moment.
JW: What do you think is the benefit of seeing performance poetry live?
TC: Some of the work that has inspired me has made me think after they have finished it. There’s something about the way they’ve done it: the words, the atmosphere they’ve created, that remains with me and it resonates. I think those are the best ones. I’m still striving to get there. That’s where the craft is.
JW: For me, I have that feeling sometimes after watching music, after seeing someone live. I like to come away from seeing art when I feel like I’m buzzing, really alive and my only response is: ‘I have to create’.
TC: To this day there are things that I’ve carried from those performances, things I’ve learned from that, and those things were spontaneous, they were in the room, they can’t be replicated. I really love that. I love the spontaneity and flexibility of recreating a moment or recreating a poem every time I perform.
Tanya Chitunhu performing at the ‘On Praise & Protest’ launch
That’s one thing I’m trying to do now: even if I’ve been doing this poem for five years, I should be able to ‘re-create’ this, every time I’m on stage. So it’s a different performance every time. It’s a one-off.
That’s hard to do because you’re using the same words. It’s a challenge for me as a performer; how do I say this in a way that’s still real and true to what I wrote it to be, but also bring it forward into today.
JW: Does the way you perform differ a lot between groups, places or people?
TC: I don’t think I’m there yet. I’m still trying to experiment with what that’s going to look like. I hope to bring something different every time, but I don’t think I always manage.
When I’m doing My Africa – which I’ve done hundreds of times – it becomes stale after a while. But [the flexibility of] performance over the page is that I should be able to recreate My Africa in such a way that it’s new, it’s fresh, as if I’m speaking in this very moment. Rather than speaking it from the past, it’s a now thing. It’s a very different performance.
I should be able to recreate [a poem] in such a way that it’s new, as if I’m speaking in this very moment.
JW: That’s interesting. In my poetry – in Precariat, it’s centred in a very specific time, a specific issue. But if I choose to read it in a different space in ten years’ time, who knows what the context will be like then? It might speak differently compared to what it tells people today.
Jess Wood, as featured in Sputnik’s Anthology Vol. 2
TC: My favourite poem now is Imagine the Angels of Bread by Martin Espada – it’s so urgent right now, but he wrote it in 1999, and I’m telling you what he says is timeless. Essentially – in the way I interpret it – it’s the kingdom come. He’s put what’s underneath on top, he’s talking about righting wrongs and injustice, but he’s imagining it the other way around and it’s now more urgent than it was in 1999.
That’s the best writing, when your work in twenty years time can still speak and be as urgent or even more so than when you wrote it. That’s the kind of writing I would love to do. I know I’m not doing that right now, but it’s exciting. I just don’t know how often that sort of work happens.
JW: It’s interesting thinking about the seen and the unseen of art; there’s something about time and context which can determine what people are able to achieve or articulate.
TC: You know what – I think the truth is timeless. If you speak the truth it should live forever. There’s truth in the Espanda poem. For me it’s a prophetic piece because he’s talking about universal ideas, big ideas: if your work has these things, it’s going to speak regardless of what time you wrote it and it should speak in sixty years. The nuances might be different, but the truth will always resonate, whether it’s on page or on stage. But for me I love when truth is said out loud. That’s why people preach, right? It’s because there’s power in that.
I think it’s a challenge in this day and age, because we’ve lost the art of being present. We’re consuming the world through media, but there’s still something really beautiful about connecting with an audience. That’s how I look at performance poetry – it’s a live conversation. Yes, I’m doing the piece and I’ve got the words, but the audience is just as much part of the performance as what I’m reading and what I’m giving to them. Their reaction, their faces, however they’re reacting to me, that’s part of my conversation with them. Sometimes I get people to be part of it – I tell them to do this or do that, because I want them to feel that they’re just as much a part of the performance as what I’m doing.
Using all these phrases and the buzzwords that people love nowadays can get you the affirmation that you want, but does it actually help people grow?
I think that’s the difference with the page. I don’t know if you write with an audience in mind?
JW: With what I was writing recently – all the stuff that’s in Temper – I think I had in mind people who are like me, encouraging those people to be empathetic in how we engage our opinions, our views and our voice.
What you say about the fact that we’re not present anymore is so true – it also relates to the way we form our opinions on situations. I really wanted to step into that and challenge that a little bit. I’m learning more that it’s a valuable thing to do to focus my work, but I’m still growing in it.
TC: It shouldn’t overtake you. There’s also the fear of writing to please people, writing to impress people. Unfortunately spoken word can be a bit like that, particularly competitive slam poetry. People can write with the intent of winning a slam and write knowing what the audience wants to hear, or what is popular-
JW: Yes, that vexes me so much. That’s what I was trying to get at in Temper, I want to speak about these issues that everyone is talking about, but in a different way. Using all these phrases and the buzzwords that people love nowadays can get you the affirmation that you want, but does it actually help people grow, and see the world differently, and see the world from different people’s perspectives?
TC: This is something that poetry should do in general: authenticity. There should be a level of being honest and real. Sometimes it’s easy to write with the intent of pleasing or to fit in or to conform, whereas I think the best kind of poetry is authentic.
There’s this saying ‘what comes from the heart, enters the heart’. I like that. What drew me into spoken word was that I really felt these performers were not just performing, they were giving me their guts, giving me their heart, and I thought – wow, I’ve got to be part of this, because this is meaningful, this is powerful, this is weighty, this is costly, this is awesome – you know, in the best possible way.
Tanya Chitunhu performs at the ‘On Praise & Protest’ launch
JW: If people only ever saw your work online, a video or on youtube, or even reading it in your book, what do you think is lost?
TC: I think that that’s an audience question. I think that you should answer that, because you’ve seen me. It’s hard for me to answer
JW: With your poetry, the way you perform it engages your senses and you have so much genuine joy when you’re reading it. I can see how much you love and value all those elements, and that really comes across in the performance. There’s something about your personality that’s only scratched on the surface in the words, and that comes to life in your voice and your character.
TC: What I’ve always loved about performance poetry and what I always try to give is passion. Passion, passion, passion – I try to embody the moment. I don’t know if I do it well every time, but I am literally becoming the poem. I’m taking on the emotions, the intent, everything.
I’m investing me into this piece. I’m giving you a piece of me, essentially. Taken to its fullest extent, it’s very exhausting, but I feel like it’s worth it. It says that this is important enough to put me into it. So then the poems will be different than on the page, I think, because it’s missing something of who I am.
JW: You’re still there in the poems on the page, but it is like a little scratch on the surface. There’s something different when you perform, when you embody it.
[In performance] I’m giving you a piece of me, essentially. The poems will be different on the page, I think, because it’s missing something of who I am.
TC: Also I think ‘performing’ and ‘performance’ is different. I tend to be quite big on stage, but I think I need to learn as well how to be small. That’s as much performance as being big, you know? You can’t be big all the time, not every poem is big. It’s learning how to do that, but still how to be myself, how to be authentic, but learning how to use everything that I can on the stage.
There’s more to work with on the stage than the page. I could sing a line or I could say a line. I could say it quietly, or loudly, I could say it with force.
JW: I see that as well on the page actually, I see that there’s so much room. You know the book On Poetry by Glen Maxwell? He talks a lot about the use of space in poetry, specifically on the page. He talks a lot about black space and white space, how the white space of the page interacts with the blackness of the words and the text and how you can manipulate and use that.
TC: A performance space is very much the same for me. I’ve thought about starting a poem from the back of the room and walking my way to the stage. I’ve never done it but i think I should-
JW: You should! I think that carries the audience through the poem in a very different way.
TC: -and it’s always that element of surprise, that’s the thing that you miss, the potential for surprise on the stage. The Haitian-American poet Carvens Lissaint, he came over almost ten years ago, performing with a group, and this poem he did – Beauty Part Three – he’s basically talking about how he grew up and was being bullied, he was overweight and then he lost the weight.
In the performance when I saw him, it was in this dark room full of people. At the end of the poem, he did something that wasn’t even part of the set. He got off the stage and he started saying ‘you are beautiful’, ‘you are beautiful’ ‘ you are beautiful’ – I remember that moment. I thought wow… when he said those words I swear something shifted in the atmosphere; something magical happened and I never forgot that, as an audience member but also as a performer.
He created that moment, and ten years later I’m still talking about it. As a performer and as a poet that’s what you want, to remain, but how you do that is going to look different on the page as on the stage. I love creating those moments – I don’t think I’ve really mastered that, but I would love to be able to do that for other people.
JW: So what are you working on at the minute?
TC: I’m praying about, how do I use this art form to serve in a bigger way, in a bigger capacity. Paul in Philippians says don’t do anything out of selfish ambition or vain conceit – value others above yourself, seek other people’s interest over your own. That’s really a challenge, especially as someone who’s on the stage, which is all about ‘what i want to say and what I want to put out’.
I don’t want my work to just be about me. I want it to be bigger than my own experiences, or my own life. The best kind of poetry helps you to see differently. I would love to be able to do that. I just know that my work can’t be rooted in myself – I’m too small and to be boring for my work to be about me, when there’s so much going on in the world.
On Friday 25th October, hip hop superstar Kanye West released his 9th solo album. It debuted at number 2 in the UK album charts and topped the US Billboard Hot 200 in the US. It is Kanye’s 9th consecutive album to debut at number 1 in America, which is a joint record (shared with Eminem). It is a full throttle, unapologetic gospel album, focused entirely on Kanye West’s newfound Christian faith. Its title sets the tone: Jesus is King.
Albums made by Christians about Christian stuff do often sell a lot of units in the US. However, in most cases, the huge majority of the people buying them are themselves Christians (for example, Chris Tomlin’s Burning Lights topped the Billboard 200 chart in 2013). Other Christian artists have topped the American charts and become very popular outside of the Christian sub culture (for example, Amy Grant or POD), but usually, these artists’ crossover albums have been somewhat restrained in their Christian content. Jesus is King is an anomaly in this regard. It is an album of relentless praise and petition directly offered to Jesus and it is pretty fair to assume, given Kanye’s reputation and fanbase, that a fair whack of the 250,000 sales (or 196.9 million streams) in the first week since its release have been to people who do not themselves follow Jesus.
This is all quite a turnaround for Kanye West. Christianity has often been in the background of his music (most notably in the 2004 single Jesus Walks), but he’d be the first to admit that now things are very different. Kanye has recently compared himself to King Nebuchadnezzar. In the book of Daniel, Nebuchadnezzar sets himself up proudly as the King of Babylon, but then is dramatically humbled by God and finally comes to recognise God as the King of Kings. It seems like a good reference point. Since releasing his debut album in 2004, his music has been willfully transgressive and probably open to the charge of being downright blasphemous. As a case in point, in 2013 he released a song entitled I Am a God on his album Yeezus (a combination of Kanye’s nickname ‘Ye’ and, well, I think you get it!) But, according to Kanye, he has been well and truly humbled, particularly referencing a psychotic episode and hospitalization in 2016 as a key turning point. Now, he is singing a very different tune. The only topic he is interested in talking (or making music) about at the moment is the gospel.
In a recent interview with TV presenter Zane Lowe, Kanye
summed up his present mindset:
‘Now that I’m in service to Christ, my job is to spread the gospel, to let people know what Jesus has done for me. I’ve spread a lot of things… but now I’m letting you know what Jesus has done for me and in that I’m no longer a slave, I’m a son of God now.’
As you might imagine, this has not gone unnoticed. In the week following the album release, the internet has been ablaze with Christians sharing their opinions on this change of direction. Opinions seem to range from ‘it’s a publicity stunt’ to ‘let’s wait and see’ to heralding Kanye as the new CS Lewis, Francis Schaeffer and William Wilberforce rolled into one.
It’s natural that questions would be asked, especially in light of Kanye’s pretty erratic behaviour over the last decade. However, even if you’re sceptical about his conversion, surely Philippians 1:15-18 would still mean that a modicum of rejoicing is appropriate. In those verses, Paul writes:
It’s true that some are preaching out of jealousy and rivalry. But others preach about Christ with pure motives… But that doesn’t matter. Whether their motives are false or genuine, the message about Christ is being preached either way, so I rejoice. And I will continue to rejoice.
Within the rejoicing, all of this should require some
broader reflection as well. While I think that we should pray for Kanye, and
that the album itself is bound to have a positive impact for the church (with
some kickback too), it also throws up some questions that would be worth
pondering. I’m particularly interested in two: how does this fit into the
bigger picture in popular culture at the moment? And what does this teach us
about how we as Christians should engage with the arts? Let’s deal with the
first today, and there’ll be another post soon about the second.
Jesus is King is an
example of a growing trend in hip hop music
Hip hop has always had a religious backbone. Like most
musical genres to emerge in the mid to late 20th century, it is not
difficult to trace the roots of hip hop back to black majority church culture.
However, quite quickly, hip hop reacted against this heritage and leant more
towards Islam. Martin Luther King was universally respected, but Malcolm X was
the role model. Pop rappers would include a token gospel track to diversify
their appeal, but the serious hip hop artists were often either embracing
mainstream Islam (like Q-Tip or Mos Def) or, more likely, namechecking fringe
Muslim sects like the Nation of Islam (Public Enemy, Ice Cube).
There were many rappers who would claim a nominal Christianity
when it suited them, and some who were more sincere, but the picture remained
pretty consistent in the 90s and early 2000s. In a musical culture that was
built around the urban black experience, Christianity was generally presented
as either a religion that was too weak willed and soft to deal with the
persisting problems of institutional racism or as an actual facilitator of the
oppression of black people in the western world.
And that’s how it seems to have continued until very
recently, when a shift seems to have taken place. Two of the key characters
who’ve been at the heart of this shift have been Kendrick Lamar and Chance the
Rapper.
While Kendrick’s music would be, let’s say, somewhat
challenging to many Christians, Christianity underpins everything he does, from
the sinner’s prayer that opens his 2012 album ‘Good Kid, M.A.A.D city’ to his
2017 album ‘Damn’ which is a sort of concept album based around Deuteronomy 28!
Many hip hop fans would regard Kendrick as the greatest rapper alive, if not
the G.O.A.T (greatest of all time).
A year before Kendrick released ‘Damn’, Chance the Rapper had released ‘Coloring Book’. Chance was already very well regarded as a rising star, but his subject matter had been largely standard rap fare. His previous mix tape had been mainly about taking hallucinogenic drugs. ‘Coloring Book’ though was a gospel album, and he stunned the audience at the 2017 Grammys, with one of the songs, a cover of Chris Tomlin’s ‘How Great is Our God’.
I’ve posted about Kendrick and Chance on this blog before but the story has moved on since then, especially for Chance.
In late 2018, Chance announced that he was taking a
sabbatical, on which he wanted to achieve two things: giving up smoking and
reading the Bible.
I’m going away to learn the Word of God which I am admittedly very unfamiliar with. I’ve been brought up by my family to know Christ but I haven’t taken it upon myself to really just take a couple days and read my Bible…
On 12th December, he posted Galatians 1:6-7 to
his 9.2 million instagram followers, and asked: “Anybody wanna read thru
Galatians with me? It’s really short.”
That evening, this is exactly what he did, reading the whole
book of Galatians live on Instagram!
His followers responded en masse. Featured amongst the
thousands of comments on the post were The NLT Bible app thanking him for the
support, famous rappers Snoop Dogg and Wiz Khalifah encouraging him to smoke
weed instead of cigarettes, quite a few Christians who took an aversion to him
reading from the NLT, and some fans who vowed to stop listening to his music
from now on (@Kralcrolyat ‘Damn, for
someone who did a whole album on acid you think you’d be a little more open
minded’). On the other hand, there were a whole load of very heartfelt and
encouraging responses. @Mylawnuhh’s is my favourite:
I need to start reading the Bible. I really need to be connected with the Lord before I go any further in my life; I just turned 15 and I want God to be an important part of my future. Especially if I ever have kids.
Earlier this year, Chance released The Big Day on which he opens up a bit more about his decision to become a Christian. Yes, there is quite a lot of swearing. And yes, some of his friends who guest on the album over share about their sexual exploits, but on the whole it’s an album about being happily married, by a reasonably new convert, who continues to publicly thank Jesus for turning his life around and seems to be showing considerable fruit of repentance.
But of course, this would only happen in America, wouldn’t it? For us poor Brits, in our cynical secular country, our rappers are cut from a different cloth? Hmm… Stormzy at Glastonbury, anyone?
What does it all
mean?
It’s important to underline here that these are not some fringe happenings within a niche cultural fad. I know that the evangelical church in the UK still seems to think that anthemic soft rock ballads are the height of relevance and cultural engagement, but musical analysts would now rate hip hop as the most listened to musical genre in the world (and apparently it has been for the last 5 years).
Now, I know that all the examples I’ve used in this post
raise further questions. These artists are complex and at times quite
conflicted in their expressions of faith. Kanye West is perhaps the best
example of this, and I know many friends, Christian and non-Christian, who had
switched off to Kanye well before his confession of faith in Jesus.
However, I’d want to urge generosity of spirit to those involved in this Christian resurgence in rap music and at the very least that we’d pray for them heartily. Living in a world that seems to be doing its utmost to stamp out Christianity, or at least silence Christians, this rebellion from within the very heart of the culture itself fuels my hope that God is not quite done with the Western world just yet.
This article was first published in a slightly edited form on the Thinktheology blog
Through our Patrons Scheme, we support Christians who are making engaging, powerful art or who are using their skills to serve their local communities. This term, one of our grants has gone to Matt Tuckey, a sound designer from Newcastle. Jonny caught up with Matt to find out about his practice and his latest project.
JM: Hi Matt, who are you and what do you do?
MT: So, my name is Matthew Tuckey, I am a sound designer and sound artist. I live in Newcastle upon Tyne with my wife Molly, and I spend a lot of time pointing microphones at things/people/places.
JM: Most of us would be familiar with graphic designers, or fashion designers, but a sound designer seems a bit more abstract. What exactly is the role of a sound designer?
MT: Good question. It’s hard to pin it down as it’s a term used across multiple platforms, industries and artforms. The best ‘job description’ I can offer is: to plan, through a collaborative creative process, the creation and playback of all sonic content in a live environment, digital media, or tangible product.
So whether that’s in theatre, video, music, or UI (I have done elements of all), I am constantly collaborating. My practice is mostly based in theatre sound design and this is the most collaborative artform I work in – I am often approached by a director, who then introduces me to a writer (or their words) and puts me in a creative team with a set designer and/or lighting designer. My approach is often to problem solve – what aspects of the story can be and need to be clearer by the creative manipulation of sounds? This normally involves, for me at least, finding an interesting or thematically relevant source material (recording an ambience, creating sound effects, working with music/composer) and creatively manipulating and playing those sounds as part of the dramatic narrative.
I also design the playback system for the theatre performances whether touring or running in one location. I like to call this a holistic sound design – working from creative storytelling all the way to technical innovation. This often sees me collaborating with another set of people – the technical or production team, and on larger productions (such as musicals) a whole sound department team.
JM: Sputnik is proud to be supporting your latest project through our Patrons Scheme. Could you talk us through it?
MT: I am very grateful to Sputnik for running this Patronage Scheme, my work is extremely technical, and these funds are crucial to its success.
I am creating an abstract piece of soundscape inspired by the poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Through a recent connection with Newcastle Universities Oral History Unit and Collective I am now hoping to incorporate elements of oral history from Newcastle’s disappearing shipyard heritage.
I am using immersive and multi-channel audio and my hope is to complete research and development by early 2020. Then to move into final production and initial preview run mid 2020, and prepare for a rural coastal tour of the piece starting early 2021.
JM: As a freelance artist who has to raise your own funds for projects, what advice would you give others regarding fund raising?
MT: These past nine months have taught me a lot about this. I’ve learnt a lot as I’ve gone along and have had to ride some disappointing rejection.
I constantly keep thinking “this is too complicated, I can’t do this” – but this brings me to something that Ed Catmull (founder of Pixar) says – “get smarter”. Having worked in theatre so much, I know the value of a team. I knew nothing about funding applications until I asked someone who did!
The match funding, bursaries, and team have been huge victories for the project. First contacts and drafting applications is really scary, but we have a saying in Newcastle “Shy bairns get nowt!”. I also would have not put in the Sputnik application, or any of the subsequent bids without listening to the words of the late Huw Evans – “just turn up”.
Thanks Matt. To keep updated on this project or to help support similar projects like this in the future, sign up for our patrons scheme.
Earlier in the summer, we caught up with Mike Lawetto about the release of his debut album under the alt-rock moniker Well Done You. As usual, with Mike, there’s never just one thing going on…
You’ve been involved with Sputnik for ages now, but could you introduce yourself for those whose lives are yet to be enriched by your work?
My name is Mike Lawetto, originally from sunny California now living in rainy Manchester. I truly do love the UK, jokes aside. I am a producer/songwriting/mix engineer and when I’m not working for others I’m working on my solo projects Well Done You (Indie Alt Rock) and Perendiz (Alt Pop). I also have a side project with singer songwriter Dan Crook which is called Crook & Lawetto (Rock).
Currently there isn’t much music online for my projects but over the next 6-8 months I will be releasing 3 EPs and an album for Well Done You, at least one EP for Perendiz and one EP for Crook & Lawetto as well as a whole host of tracks I’m working on for some really cool artists.
Tell us about the album…
The album is called Welcome To Camp Sunshine, and if you love all things rock it shouldn’t disappoint. The best way I can describe it is pop songs for rock kids. I’ve spent some serious time making sure it wasn’t a boring album and I think I’ve just pulled it off. We’ll see.
How are you releasing it?
We’re going to release 75% of the album as 3 EPs, and then the whole album in October, with a further single in November and a Christmas single in December. An American Asthmatic, Please And Thank You and Not A Doctor Shh!! are released. Welcome To Camp Sunshine, the album, will be released October 4th.
Got a great year of music coming out and I’m excited.
The album will be available to buy both physically and digitally on Bandcamp on Friday 4th October and on all other digital platforms later in the month. Keep an eye out on WDY’s facebook or instagram for updates and in the meantime check out Mike’s official video for the single “Nobodies Got A Clue”
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It all looks so effortless. The master’s sword dances through the air, writing its signature in bold swoops and stings. Try to emulate the motion yourself and you’ll be suddenly and rudely aware of the skill and dexterity of the master. So it is with Praying Mantis’s rapping. He delivers multitudes of beautifully crafted multi-syllable delights and, as always, he makes it sound easy.
The Legend of One is the work of a rap veteran. There’s some of the funk-fuelled, emphatic punctuation of Masta Ace, the furrowed brow intensity of Inspectah Deck and the brimstone wit of Chester P. The producers are magpies, finding gems from hip-hop’s NYC golden age as well as sharp, glittering sounds from various UK hip-hop junk shops. The snares throughout are mesmeric. Listen to Guttah Breath and join the snap of a thousand necks. Together the production and the imagery exude late 20th century summers and the metallic taste of blood after a lip-busting scrap with a rival gang. It’s scuffing your prized British Knights as you scrabble over a wall chased by a Dobermann. Mantis recounts both the warm and cold memories of the past.
This is an autobiography which tussles with the bruising, humbling realizations of unfinished business. The choruses are strong and contagious, and the guest vocalists bring complimentary vibes, adding further gravitas to the ideals and ideas. One gripe: only the album opener features cuts and scratches. More rhythm-elbowing turntablism would have been welcome.
Mantis talks about his zig-zag killer flow, referencing Wu-Tang Clan’s leader, the RZA. The Legend of One wears its Wu-Tang influence on its sleeve, underlining Mantis’s rap journey and celebrating the sounds that hyped up and captivated his younger self. For those new to Mantis, the playful ruggedness of the track RIP attempts to bring you up to speed.
We hear the sheer joy of flow and a vocalist sparring with the snare drum. A deep seam of spirituality runs through the album. Mantis is vocal about his gratitude for the journey he’s being on and the grace of God. At times he stands his ground, weapon raised, roaring ‘None shall pass’ yet at other times, he’s on his knees, open- handed, ready to break bread and talk to the Oracle.
Mantis aims the biggest, most challenging questions at himself. What are the foundations of my life built on? Can I escape the colonization of the soul? Inevitably we the listeners start asking the same questions too. Sonically and rhythmically The Legend of One is part-nostalgia, part sabre-duel in a cultural snowstorm. It’s digging in the past rather than breaking much new ground, but the unflinching honesty is brave and the poetic techniques are ice cold.
Sharon Boothroyd is a London-based photographic artist whose work has been exhibited worldwide in many prestigious festivals and galleries, and is held in public collections such as the V&A Library, the Yale Centre for British Art and PhotoIreland Foundation.
Sharon also lectures at the Royal College of Art, where she is undertaking a PhD – and unsurprisingly, one of the first things you notice when talking to Sharon is her immensely deep and appreciative knowledge of her discipline, and wider art movements in general.
From ‘SW’
What stands out beyond even that is the beautifully empathetic nature of her work. One of the goals of her PhD research project is to reduce stigma and raise public awareness of psychosis; she describes it as an ‘urgent feminist enquiry’ seeking to subvert the gender power dynamics in the usage of labels such as ‘hysteria’ and ‘madness’. The ongoing process, as we learned from Sharon’s visit to the Birmingham Sputnik Hub, is also a research project into the world itself, the abuses of psychotherapy, the complicity of art in the mistreatment of women: and into Sharon herself.
But you needn’t be an academic to understand the power of Sharon’s work. A recent project, SW, is a simple documentation of the characters, buildings and wildlife that make up South West London; capturing respectfully the simple dignity of everyday ‘others’ in her local community. Even her more abstract or experimental work has, at its heart, a raw human-ness and humility, a breaking down of artifice in the pursuit of honesty, be that painful or otherwise.
Before I came to know Jesus, I was already fighting against social injustice; but I was always the centre of my life, and self-centred in my aspirations and my desire to control things. I really liked the figure of Jesus, but only at the historical level. I was the artistic director of a company with my wife, Serena, who was an interpreter and took care of the organizational part.
Luca and wife Serena Ansidoni
At the age of 26, I started to follow my very experimental artistic research, and this gave me some notoriety. But it also exposed some problems with my ego, as I started being very demanding with my students and interpreters. I began to shut myself up in my art more and more. Art was my God, and I lived in the continuous frustration of seeking results.
After my first film “Revolution” (a work of experimental video art made against abuses of power in Italy), stains began to emerge on my body. We thought it was a dermatological problem, but after a week, there was a big black bruise on my stomach. We went to the hospital and I was told that it could be leukemia. You are meant to have 240,000 platelets in your blood: it turned out that I only had 2,000!!
The doctors could not explain how I was even still alive! I was given a week to wait for further results and that week of waiting was crazy. I started thinking about my life, the things I took for granted such as walking, drinking, my wife’s eyes, her kisses, eating. I was letting my life pass without fully experiencing it.
I told the artists I was closest to that I wanted to create a work to thank God. They were incredulous
But, when the results arrived, I was told that it was nothing serious and after a short period of treatment, my blood levels were stable again and I was out of hospital. Incredible! The first thing I did, once I was out, was to cry for joy with my wife.
Immediately, I called all of the artists that I was closest to in my company and I told them I wanted to create a work to thank God for giving me a second chance in life. They were incredulous, they could not believe I was doing a work of thanksgiving to God. I completed the piece in one night and there, for the first time, I had an experience of God. After that experience I was like a different person. People did not recognize me anymore; I wanted to help people and my art took a very social turn, focusing on the suffering of the most needy.
We continued taking our art in this direction, and this led us to move to Tenerife for 5 years, where we partnered with a high school to develop an educational project. It was at this point that I decided to create some work that was more explicitly spiritual, focusing on Jesus. I wanted to find people with real faith for this project, and I spoke to our neighbours about it. Our neighbours were a 60-year-old couple, Raul and Olaya. Raul told me that he wasn’t religious, but he knew God personally and invited us to go with them the following Saturday to their church.
On 13 September 2014 we entered the church for the first time and were very perplexed. We were used to Catholic rituals, but at this church, the music was played in a modern style and the people prayed for their friends with ‘a free voice’. After the service, we met the pastor and talked to him about our proposed film project. He was immediately interested and put his church at our disposal both to use their space and to involve people from the church in the various roles.
After that time in church, I started to ask my neighbour Raul a thousand questions about God and about Christianity. He was a retired former Civil Guard agent, responsible for training the recruits, and even in the kingdom of God he was starting my training!
One day, Raul and Olaya invited us for dinner. Serena did not want to go because she knew that faith would be talked about the whole time, so she pretended to have a sore throat. When she found this out, Olaya asked me if she could go and talk to Serena and she ended up praying for her. Although we found this a bit strange, when she prayed, we felt an indescribable feeling of peace. Later that night Serena found herself crying for no reason, which was very unusual for her.
I had thought that the whole thing was a theatre, that it was all fake. Then, to my surprise, I saw my wife charging towards the preacher
During the time of worship, I realized that Serena was crying again. I did not understand. I said to myself: but she is an atheist! The preacher spoke in Spanish and I only understood about 25% of it, but at one point in the talk, he asked if anyone needed prayer. Many people started going forward and as he prayed, there were many strong reactions, people crying and falling over. I had seen some things online about extreme charismatic experiences and I thought that the whole thing was a theatre, that it was all fake. Then, to my surprise, I turned to see my wife charging towards the preacher. When he prayed with her, she started crying in a way I’d never seen her cry before.
It was clear that something extraordinary was happening, so I said to God: “if you are there, show me!” and I too went forward to the preacher. When he prayed for me I felt a great fire inside, I fell on the ground and began to laugh, full of joy. Looking up to the sky, I had the feeling that I had finally found it, that now I understood everything!
Artist believers meet at ‘One’, an offshoot of Hopera church
After all of this, Serena and I prayed with the pastor and we both accepted Jesus into our lives. I don’t think I even knew what I was saying, but I know that from that day, our lives have completely changed. I left behind my biggest fears and my obsessions. Serena and I looked at each other differently – our love was growing and improving every moment. After only a month I was baptized in the sea, and I was actually born again, to a new life.
A year later, we returned to Italy and began to talk about our experience to our friends, family and our entire artistic group. Many, seeing our passion and the real change in our lives, have decided to believe, and many young artists have come to the faith. Now we have a group called One, which started because we felt we needed to live out our faith in a completely new and fresh way.
At One, we aim to make God known to young artists. We do not use religious terms, we do not have a denomination, we focus on three things: Jesus, singing to him, and prayer. This has generated a unique love for God. Now in the group there are about twenty young people, some of whom also come to Hopera, our church. They still remain artists, but with a very healthy and passionate Christian imprint and their enthusiasm has a positive effect on the whole community.
“I am convinced that art is a relationship and not a commodity. This effects my decisions, motivations, output and income.”
Dundee-based conceptual artist David McCulloch (‘Cully’, to those in the know) is a maker and a curator, using multi-media formats and experimental galleries in the hopes of rediscovering a healthier role for artists in society: one defined, perhaps, by connection and communication, rather than a commodified experience within a ‘white cube’.
David’s work takes many tones: in Father and Son (video below), David’s own father and son are part of a ‘performance’ where they look at, and are interviewed about, Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ, investigating knowledge, interpretation and faith through three generations. In the darkly comic Last One Standing (featured photo) a giant stone ‘book’ strung precariously from a scaffolding is imprinted with the slogan ‘You could die reading this’.
Whether it’s his own work, or involvement in wider circles with Nomas* Projects and Sharing Not Hoarding, David’s approach is both generous and generative; he lives up to his own artistic creed by creating work that manages to be inviting and personal while still being deeply conceptual – a harder feat than it looks.
Malcolm Guite has called himself a “poet, priest, rock & roller: in any order you like, really.” It’s a succinct way to describe an otherwise indescribable character: a bearded bard from some other realm full of Tolkien-esque polymaths, and currently a lecturer and chaplain of the Divinity Faculty at Cambridge.
Guite is a generous interviewee, so full of words that he often runs breathless finishing his sentences (he’s somehow both intimidatingly sharp and amiably approachable at the same time); which makes his many interviews a good way to get acquainted with his style and process. We’d recommend his series of interviews with The Cultivating Project, this in-depth profile, or his appearance on Nomad Podcast, at Greenbelt.
Guite’s work, of course, is as thoughtful and thorough as his conversations, embracing the confrontations, confusions and mysticisms of faith. It hums with a deep belief in the goodness of poetry itself: poetry as a life-giving force, and as a means to give people confidence that their ‘inner’, spiritual lives are as real and revelatory as the material world.
It can be hard to know where to start when it comes to his poetry and the rest, but let’s be contrary and begin with some of the most recent: Parable and Paradox, a book of poetry inspired by the sayings of Jesus; and a biography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, called Mariner. But as an even simpler starting point, try reading this sonnet for our times, called The six days world transposing in an hour.
The story goes like this: a tight-knit new generation of musicians in London is shaking up the jazz scene as you know it, turning the ‘establishment’ on its head via grassroots gigs, independent labels, and a wild spirit of frontier-breaking: not so much G&Ts on the lawn, much more Bitches Brew.
Between varied artists such as Binker & Moses, Yussef Dayes, Zara McFarlane, and the many faces of Shabaka Hutchings, UK jazz is, to put it lightly, having a ‘moment’ – birthing a multicultural form of jazz that incorporates Afrobeat, dub, garage and grime mixed up with top-notch chops. And at the centre of the cyclone is the five-piece troupe Ezra Collective, with their enigmatic powerhouse of a drummer, Femi Koleoso – who the New York Times recently tracked down to talk about the scene.
Alongside Ezra Collective, Femi mans the traps for the saxophonist Nubya Garcia, and R&B ‘new big thing’ Jorja Smith – and you may have also caught his blistering drum solo in this Champions League advert back in the summer. He’s a man years-deep in his craft, bringing people a next-level musical experience, and – as the NYT profile points out – he’s changing the scene for the better, as part of the new jazz vanguard breaking it open to younger and more diverse players.
Make no mistake, Femi Koleoso is an artist who’s exactly where he ought to be.
Two weeks ago, we spoke to Los Angeles-based choreographer and teacher Marlita Hill about gracefully dismantling the expectations facing artists in churches. In part two of our interview, Marlita explains in more detail the groundwork that she works through when tutoring artists.
Jonny Mellor: You talk about the importance of an artist’s whole art-life, rather than just the work they produce, could you explore this topic with us?
Marlita Hill: In the Kingdom Artist Initiative (KAI), one major question we answer is how do you serve God and build His kingdom working “out there” making “that kind” of art with “those people”? There is still a very present belief that Christians should only make art in church, for church, about God, and for worship. Any activity outside of that should be focused on evangelism; and the only reason to associate with non-Christians is to get them saved.
Well, I don’t share that belief. Church is wherever the people of God are. The Kingdom of God is bigger than a building and consists of so much more than evangelism. And, worship is practiced and offered up by what we do, as much as it is by what we say.
As an artist in Christ, you have a life in art, not just a message in art. Your life in art is a valid, God-honoring way that you participate in Kingdom citizenship and Christian community. In KAI, I teach about this life in art as three parts: Person, Process, and Product.
Person.
Person is who you are. The Bible says that you are the light of the world (Mt. 5:14). You are the salt of the earth (Mt. 5:14). You are the way that God diffuses His fragrance throughout the earth (2 Cor. 2:14). And you are an exhibitor and dispenser of His love. Before you ever do anything, and regardless of what your art talks about, this is who you are. This is how you show up in every space you enter in your art career. You are the representative and ambassador of the living God and of His Kingdom in the earth. You don’t have to do anything extra to accomplish that.
Process.
Process is how you do things: how you go about creating your art, how you make career decisions, and how you interact with the people around you. You honor God, make Him known, and demonstrate the Kingdom at work by the way you go about making these decisions, by your disposition in executing them, and by what leads and influences you in making them.
Product.
Product is the actual art work. A lot of us struggle trying to figure out what we can make art about. And we shouldn’t. Psalm 24 says, “The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it. The world and all its people belong to Him.”2 Peter tells us that God has “given us everything that pertains to life and godliness.” If this is true, what could there possibly be that we cannot talk about? Nothing! It’s all fair game. It doesn’t matter what you talk about in your art. What matters is the perspective you present on what you talk about.
Screenshot from Marlita’s Int/Adv Modern Class at Cortines High School
JM: But surely any Christian in any profession would share the first two of these in one respect. Focusing in on the product then, do you think that an artwork has any special value, beyond, say, a fruitful business deal, a well engineered bridge or a successful operation?
MH: As far as what art can uniquely do, I believe its singularity lies in its qualities of being stealth and efficient. Art operates on a frequency that cuts right to the essence of things. It communicates so deeply, so intimately, and so quickly, that people find themselves impacted before they’ve found the words to articulate what just happened to them. We can react to art once we’ve reoriented ourselves back in our intellectual fortresses; but we cannot deny that something got in. Art cuts right to places we would have to ask permission to enter through any other means.
We talk about salvation, but the salvation experience is an unrealistic to our actual faith lives as romantic movies are to real relationships. Where’s our mundane Tuesdays?
This is what’s so powerful about Christians being present and active in our art careers. As Kingdom citizens in the world, we have the opportunity to contribute the Kingdom perspective to cultural dialogue. We’re always told to focus on the salvation experience. But this is as unrealistic to our actual faith lives as romantic movies are to real relationships. The whole movie only goes up to the point of two people getting together, but we never see the reality of their mundane Tuesday. We talk about salvation, but what does life look like as a Christian once you’ve gotten saved? Where’s our mundane Tuesday?
Even though we’re Christians, we’re still sexual beings, we still have feelings, we still deal with loss and grief, have awe, fall in love, make mistakes, feel confused. We still engage in the human experience. So, what does that human experience look like from a Kingdom perspective? How do you address, confront, and look at being human and living in this earth in all its messiness from the other side of being saved?
JM: You specifically serve artists who have careers in the arts. What do you think are the key challenges that Christians who are professional artists face, and what advice would you give them to overcome these challenges?
MH: Three things artists of faith struggle with are liberty, identity, and fragmentation. I believe every artist struggles with these in some way but they manifest uniquely in the faith community. As the arts are slowly being accepted back into the church, artists of faith working in secular culture still have so few champions to tell them that all parts of who they are (as Christian, creative, and cultural participant) are from God, to assure them that they (right where they are, doing what they’re doing) are a needed and contributing part of the body of Christ, and to show them how to victoriously navigate their art life in God’s purpose. Without this, they’re left constantly struggling for permission and validation, constantly struggling with who they are and how they want to be seen and known, constantly feeling like they have to make the impossible choice about which part of themselves gets their attention. But none of these struggles are necessary.
This is why KAI focuses on the artist’s relationship with God, and between their faith, art, and career. To deal with these struggles we have to do three things:
One: We have to remember that we cannot necessarily equate our experiences with the church as being how God sees and feels about us. We have to go to Him for ourselves to find out how He actually sees us. That’s where true, unshakeable identity comes from.
Two: We have to forgive the church and other Christians for not knowing how to tell us who we are and where we fit. We just have to.
Three: We have to release the internal divide we’ve perpetuated, which most likely exists for good reason. Still, we have to allow them to coexist and thrive together in the same space because God never intended our faith, art, and career to be fragmented within us.
The brainchild of Glasgow’s Tim Kwant, Tongues. began as an electronic solo project that scored an unexpected hit across the blogosphere with its debut release, ‘Colours in the Dark’.
Since then, Kwant has been joined by a full band to give life to a sound that ranges from grungy riff-driven synthrock to sweet heartfelt refrains – and the band’s bass-heavy, visually immersive live shows have seen them pick up festival appearances, radio play, and prominent playlist slots, with their music getting compared to Alt-J, Hot Chip, MGMT and Caribou.
We were thrilled to feature Tongues.’ latest single ‘Not Like the Real Thing’ on our Sputnik Sounds Vol. 2 compilation – a free giveaway to Sputnik Patrons – and its accompanying EP, ‘Fight’, is a tightly-sequenced, hook-laden listen that balances its glistening production with a fraught, emotional vocal delivery.
Tongues. have more music ready to release – allegedly before the end of the year – so it’s fair to say we’re intrigued to find out where Kwant and the band take things next.
‘I do things involving things’. Edinburgh-based artist Stephanie Mann once described her art practice this way, and true enough, her bright and surreal work often defies easy description.
While Mann’s background is in sculpture, the main body of her work consists of photographs and videos, often featuring a dazzling array of brightly coloured objects with contrasting textures, at times being placed, pushed and manipulated by the artist herself.
‘Balancing Summit’ by Stephanie Mann
Her preoccupation throughout much of her work is on the subconscious; on what can be found there and how to unearth it (a process she acts out in her 2013 video ‘Sand Hands’). Whereas many explorations of the subconscious may focus on the darker side of life, Stephanie’s playful surrealism is refreshingly innocent and childlike, yet built around a deep familiarity with still life tradition and sculptural principles.
In 2013, she worked on a short film commissioned by the BBC in Japan and she has had solo exhibitions in both Summerhall, Edinburgh and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. She presently works out of her studio at Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop.
Exhibition documentation from ‘The transparent tortoiseshell and the un-ripe umbrella’, Glasgow Sculpture Studios.
Marlita Hill is a dancer, teacher, choreographer, author – and much more – based in Los Angeles. We had the pleasure of talking to her about some foundational questions around her practice and approach to the worlds of faith and the arts.
Jonny Mellor: Hi Marlita. Could you introduce yourself to Sputnik’s illustrious readers?
JM: There is an ongoing conversation about faith and art in the church at the moment, and in the UK at least it seems to be gaining some momentum. While this is good, I sometimes find that people are missing each other in this conversation and it can lead to churches supporting some forms of creativity, but at the same time actually alienating artists. I’ve found it helpful the way you frame this conversation to bring clarity to the different aspects of faith and art – could you share some of your thoughts on this?
MH: In the faith and art conversation, I believe it is important for us to recognize that when we say ‘artist,’ we are speaking to a remarkably diverse group of people – who are involved in different forms of art, who function in different contexts, who make art for different reasons and different audiences, who are in different seasons in their art life and have different needs. The artists in our churches have different experience levels, different expectations, and different ways they desire to be cared for and supported.
When we don’t acknowledge all this difference, we end up alienating artists. And while it is impossible for any one organization to serve all the needs of such a diverse group of people, acknowledging this diversity can help us approach the infrastructures we build to serve and support artists through a more inclusive lens.
Kingdom Artist Initiative
JM: Not only are the arts often misunderstood in churches though, they are often simply not valued. Why do you think this is?
MH: I believe that the undervaluing of the arts in the church is due to several factors: value and usefulness, personal conviction and comfort level, and capacity.
Usefulness.
In the local church, there’s generally a three-pronged focus: worship, evangelism, and doctrine. The church readily embraces activities and expressions that directly serve these three areas. Because they are where the focus lies, most everything that is done in church is a means to these three ends. And with that, usefulness becomes the measurement for value. So, if your activity is not a clear means to those three ends, the church struggles to find them useful. In struggling to find them useful, they struggle to find them valuable. If they have no usefulness and therefore no value, then the question becomes why should we engage with it?
Most everything that is done in church is a means to worship, evangelism, and doctrine.
This raises a question; because some artists of faith engage in their art in ways that do directly serve those three areas. They want to partner with the church in serving the congregation, using their art to lead and engage people in worship, to help illuminate Scripture, and to share the Gospel and make Christ known. Why, then, doesn’t the church embrace them? That, I believe, is where we get into the other two factors.
Personal conviction and comfort level.
Despite the presence of creativity and artistry in the Bible, and despite there being evidence that God communes with His people in and through the arts, there are those church leaders that simply don’t agree and don’t see the arts as a suitable activity for the church. They don’t see the arts as a credible medium for facilitating or engaging in the worship experience and spiritual growth.
Or, they only see certain artforms as credible mediums. Dancers face this a lot. Where pastors are comfortable having musicians and visual artists active in their churches, they are not comfortable with a dancer. Actors are only acceptable for Easter and Christmas plays. Even with musicians, only certain instruments, musical forms, and even musical notes are acceptable in different congregations.
But this has nothing to do with the artist. And it has nothing to do with God. Still, we both are subjected to the comfort levels of those in leadership.
Capacity.
There is the reality that you need infrastructure to incorporate any activity in the church, including the arts. Some church leaders don’t believe they have the capacity (time, resources, know-how, space, etc) to include the arts in their congregational life. Of those, some view the arts as a nice addition if it’s convenient; but it’s not a priority so there is never any real motivation to find a way to make it possible.
Very few artists are ever included in planning and infrastructural conversations, so their possibilities to contribute are never heard.
Also, it rarely seems to occur to leaders that their artists are very capable of expanding that capacity when they are empowered to do so. Very few artists are ever included in planning and infrastructural conversations, so their possibilities to contribute are never heard. As leaders feel like they already have much on their plate, it is much easier to exclude the arts than it is to take the time to work through how they can be made an integral part.
JM: Coming back to your own experience, how do you think your own art life has deepened your relationship with Jesus? What have you learnt about God that you wouldn’t have done if you’d never been a dancer?
MH: My life as an artist has been an integral part of my relationship with God. In fact, I’ve gotten to know Him as I’ve pursued this life in dance.
There are two huge things I’ve learned that have liberated my relationship with Him. The first thing I learned is that the church’s way of seeing and interacting with me as an artist is rarely representative of the way God sees and interacts with me. I learned not to try to understand how God thought about me as an artist through the church. I had to get that straight from Him. I love the church. I appreciate the church. But I also understand they don’t often know how to care for me.
The second huge thing I learned is that God is not in relationship with me because I’m useful to Him. Nor is He in relationship with me because my gifts are useful to Him. He is in relationship with me because He loves me, and He has gifted me as an expression of His love.
I have learned that He gave me art for my life, not just my Christian service. My art is something He’s given me to engage with, and take space in, this world. He gave it to me to shape and form me. He gave it to me to release and receive. He gave it to me to commune with Him, to learn about Him and learn from Him. He gave it to me to enjoy.
I’ve learned that there’s not one thing about my artist-ness that I have to apologize for. I’ve learned that He takes great pleasure in it and gives me so much liberty to live in all the fullness of these things He’s gifted me to do. And this is what I hope to help other artists experience from their relationship with Him.
South London visual artist Lakwena is slowly transforming her home town – and other cities around the world – with her huge, kaleidoscopic murals, breathing life and energy into everyone who walks by.
It’s impossible to miss Lakwena’s work – it’s as eye-catching as it is uncompromising, a supremely confident matrix of bright colour, inspired by (amongst other things) messianic theology, mythology and Afrofuturism. Entwined with the colours are the messages – The Power of Girl. The Future is Gold. Do not relent in doing good. In a recent interview with Elephant magazine, Lakwena describes her work as a connection point to the spiritual world:
“I want [my paintings] to have something of the gospel in them… I want my life to have some good news in it. Adverts shout a mythology that if you buy a product your life will be complete. If I put a painting up then I’m doing the same.”
Photo: Benjamin Madgwick for clinique.co.uk
Photo: Ferdinand Feys
The expressive, eye-popping, myth-making work has caught its followers: Lakwena has been invited to create murals and installations in Miami, New York, Las Vegas, Arkansas, and her work can frequently spotted bursting through the grey in London suburbs. And for the thousands who walk past her work in different cities every day, Lakwena is an unseen force making her world a better place to be.
In Artist of the Week, we celebrate faith-driven artists making quality work for universal audiences.
Photographer Marksteen Adamson is a force to be reckoned with. Previously the Global Creative Director of Interbrand, overseeing massive branding projects for well-known names, he set up Agency ASHA in 2002, as well as photography training programme Nimbus, and the Big Cold Turkey Foundation, set up to support youth suffering from either their own addictions or those of someone close.
As part of ASHA’s work, the PEEL project works with young people as a means to help their mental health, self-expression and sense of self-identity, through a mixture of poetry and photography. The results so far have been fantastic – both in terms of the work produced, and the response to the programme.
Displayed work from the PEEL project
With all these projects under the belt you might forget that Marksteen is also a brilliant photographer – and disarmingly humble about it, as if it’s an afterthought. And on the one hand, it’s true that Marksteen continually puts others first, using his time and his skills to celebrate their development rather than his own. But it’s also his creative zeal that underpins all his strategizing, and makes him an inspiring figure capable of driving forwards massive projects.
Unsurprisingly, you’ll often find him being a guest lecturer or conference speaker, writing articles, or appearing on radio or television. We don’t know where the man finds all the time, but his generosity and skill make him a great example of how faith and art co-exist and interact.
In Artist of the Week, we celebrate faith-driven artists making quality work for universal audiences.
South London four-piece Dutchkid have been working on their pristine synth-pop sound for a while – it’s nearly a year since they first appeared with the sparse, atmospheric single ‘Temporary’ – but the process has finally culminated in the brand new EP ‘Empires’, which appeared at the end of August.
‘Empires’ is an impeccably packaged slice of pop, proudly wearing the influences of the XX, the 1975, Jack Garratt and others besides. Dutchkid go straight for the jugular throughout: every moment on the EP is a chiselled hook, a t-shirt ready slogan or an ethanol-clean synth sound, with barely a second wasted. These are the kind of radio-ready, hyper-earnest pop songs that take years of work to sound effortless, a magic trick that the band pulls off perfectly.
But it’s not so surprising, given that the group describe themselves as not just a band, but a creative collective, which includes members outside of the four musicians. That, in itself, is a savvy move: it reflects the fact that bands in 2018 are, more than ever, multimedia projects needing to be curated from every angle – dutchkid keep all their creative decisions in the family, and the approach pays off.
‘Empires’ is a strong opening gambit, and we’ll be watching keenly to see what happens next – we recommend you give them a follow, or if you can, go catch their first headline show in the New Year, at the Sebright Arms.
Buy/stream Empires here, or buy tickets for the Sebright Arms show here.
Hannah Rose Thomas is an English artist creating stunning portrait paintings of refugees, whose work has been shown at the Saatchi Gallery, the Houses of Parliament and Durham Cathedral.
As part of the process, Hannah has organised art projects in Kurdistan with Yezidi women who had escaped ISIS captivity, and for Rohingya children in refugee camps on the Myanmar border. We asked Hannah to talk about her journey a little – if you’d like to find out more, see Hannah’s website, and follow her on Instagram.
You’ve said you’re influenced by Islamic art and poetry – and of course you’re an Arabic speaker. Where does that connection with Middle Eastern cultures stem from?
I studied History and Arabic at Durham due to a desire to understand different cultures. Arabic is a beautiful language, and the written script an artform in itself.
I first travelled to Iran when I was eighteen years old, and was captivated by the breathtaking beauty of the mosques of Isfahan and Shiraz. I draw inspiration from Islamic art and poetry to celebrate the rich cultural heritage of the Middle East which is so often forgotten and overshadowed by war.
You’ve been involved with humanitarian work for some time, and presumably painting for a while too. Have they always felt connected, or was there a particular event or story that caused you to bring them together?
I have always loved to paint ever since I was very young, but my interest in portraiture began as a result of my travels and humanitarian work in Africa and the Middle East. While living in Jordan as an Arabic student in 2014, I had an opportunity to organise art projects with Syrian refugees for UNHCR – an experience which opened my eyes to the magnitude of the refugee crisis confronting our world today. I began to paint the portraits of some of the refugees I had met, to show the people behind the global crisis, whose personal stories are otherwise often shrouded by statistics.
My unusual position as an English artist who is fluent in Arabic has enabled me to cross cultural barriers and communicate their stories, and I’ve been deeply moved by the stories of the refugees I’ve had the privilege of meeting. Each person I have spoken with has a story of suffering and remarkable resilience. It was to share their stories that I began painting their portraits.
Panels from ‘Yezidi Women: ISIS Survivors’
I love these words from Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird: “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view… Until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.” What does it truly mean to imagine yourselves in another person’s skin, to feel what they feel? How can we begin to imagine how it feels to flee our homes and the unimaginable horrors of war? There is nothing more important than empathy for another’s suffering. We have to feel compassion for one another if we are going to survive with dignity.
“I don’t think I could go to these places if I didn’t have art as a way to process and express all that I have seen.”
The ‘art of empathy’ is a concept that has been on my heart while painting the portraits of Yezidi women and Rohingya women this last year. Often tears would fall while painting and thinking about their stories and ongoing suffering: the paintings are a way of offering a prayer for them to God.
I don’t think I could go to these places if I didn’t have art as a way to process and express all that I have seen. My work has taught me to look for the sacred beauty, dignity and value of the human spirit, even in places of darkness and suffering. I hope that these paintings remind us of our shared humanity and that we have more in common than what divides us.
A Yezidi woman, former ISIS captive, paints a self-portrait
Who’s the primary audience in your mind: the portrait subjects themselves, or the folks far away?
The hope was to use the art projects and paintings as a tool for advocacy and a way to bring their stories to places of influence in the West. This year the paintings by Yezidi women from an art project I organised in Northern Iraq last year were shown alongside my paintings in the Houses of Parliament and DfID.
Ever since I was young I have wanted to be a voice for the voiceless somehow, and never imagined it could be through art.
The start of your process is so personal; have you also been able to share moments with your audience, to witness their reaction to your work?
There have been many times when people I’ve spoken to have been visibly moved by the paintings. I think that this is because a portrait painting is intensely personal, and also it provides space for people to contemplate and reflect. We are so frequently bombarded with tragic stories in the news that I think we become a little numb; however a portrait painting can bring us face to face with the human stories behind the refugee crisis, which makes it much more real.
The MPs and Peers who visited my exhibition Yezidi women: ISIS Survivors in the houses of Parliament March 2018 were profoundly moved, and as a consequence the plight of Yezidi women was raised in the House on a number of occasions, including a mention by Theresa May during PMQs.
In Artist of the Week, we celebrate faith-driven artists making quality work for universal audiences.
Birmingham-based designer Luke Tonge is a man of many, many hats: chiefly a freelance graphic designer, Luke also lectures at BCU, art directs The Recorder magazine for Monotype, and founded CRTD, a network for Christian creative professionals to connect with one another.
Most recently, Luke was one of the directors of the inaugural Birmingham Design Festival – a stunning spread of talks, exhibitions and workshops across the city, over 4 days, drawing in huge, influential names and sponsors, and injecting some serious creative pride into the local design scene. It’s hard to overstate what Luke and his team pulled off – this was truly something for the city’s creative community to shout about, and most of the festival was totally free to attend. Check out Creative Review’s interview with Luke and co-director Dan Alcorn, here.
Photo: Thom Bartley for Birmingham Design Festival www.thombartley.com
The shiny new design festival aside, Luke’s work speaks for itself. He’s a man who makes the print medium sing, with a style that tastefully balances cleanliness and chaos – the right white space here, the right 120-pt typeface there – and a knack for celebrating and incorporating others’ work, as he does so well in The Recorder.
It’s symptomatic of what makes Luke such an asset to Brum at large: so good at connecting and collaborating, that you could almost miss the raw talent pulling it all together.
Spreads from The Recorder.
Follow Luke Tonge on Twitter (his digital stomping ground of choice) to have a chance of keeping up with the man’s output and various projects.
In Artist of the Week, we celebrate faith-driven artists making quality work for universal audiences.
Maybe more than any other music genre, faith is a real and vibrant topic within the world of hip-hop: some of the most critically acclaimed, high-profile rappers in the US make work that vibrates with spiritual questions and profess a multifaceted faith that reflects the complex and chaotic times we live in.
Things have changed in the UK too, with Stormzy’s gospel-influenced debut in particular breaking down cultural taboos: and if you heard the BBC’s 1XTRA show on Rap & Religion you’ll have come across London’s NoNameDisciple.
You could pick out all kinds of reference points in NoNameDisciple’s style – maybe K.Flay, Jamila Woods, Mr. Lamar himself; like her US counterparts, NoNameDisciple takes a raw, truthful approach to her music, using faith as a prism to look at the realities of life, and takes influence from the best in the game.
And while the US is setting the bar with Kendrick or Childish Gambino’s visual collaborators (Dave Meyers and Hiro Murai, respectively), NoNameDisciple clearly has the hunger and ambition to chase after them: her double-video ‘A Millennial’s Godfidence’ marks a step up on every level, from the cold, meter-busting instrumentals, and crisp vocal delivery, to Onismo Muhlanga’s enigmatic visuals. Give her enough time and there’s no telling what she could do.
In Artist of the Week, we celebrate faith-driven artists making work for universal audiences.
Though a part of Sputnik for many years, we still felt honoured to have Birmingham-based jewellery-maker Ruth Mary running a ‘small business’ workshop at Catalyst Festival this summer. When it comes to making a living in the creative industries, Ruth has wisdom to spare; her home-run jewellery company was featured in the Guardian’s top 100 small businesses last year, and she was invited to speak at the Women in Business Expo 2017 at Birmingham Council House.
More to the point though, Ruth’s work is stunning: a genuinely unorthodox form of jewellery that is the result of her self-taught expertise as both a silversmith and lace maker. Ruth’s design concepts are hand-stitched in thread, then recreated in precious metal: the end result is both beguiling, and evidently popular!
Paisley Handmade Silver Lace Necklace, by Ruth Mary Jewellery
We also hugely appreciate Ruth’s openness about her route into the industry: she trained originally as a chemist, but a bout of serious illness prompted a change in direction. No doubt it’s Ruth’s faith, in part, that enables her to be open with her story, where the pressure on the self-employed can be to present everything in the most positive light possible. It’s beautiful to see God work in her life this way, but Ruth’s work is worth celebrating regardless: a talented and unique craftsperson making waves in her industry.
You can see more of Ruth’s work, and order her jewellery, at her website.
He’s also a fantastic writer and performer, and we were greatly pleased to support Huw’s work by helping him publish his debut poetry collection Minor Monuments with the help of our Sputnik Patrons.
‘Minor Monuments’ by Huw Evans
Minor Monuments is a collection of poems inspired by the district of Ardudwy in North Wales, the works of Sir Thomas Browne and the Welsh mythologies of the Mabinogion. You can read more about it, and buy a copy, from Huw’s website. You can also attend the official launch event at the Holy Biscuit in Newcastle, next week – more details here.
Welcome to our new feature, Artist of the Week, in which we celebrate faith-driven artists making work for universal audiences.
SE Londoner Samuel John Butt is a photographic artist whose work has been featured on the pages of i-D magazine, used as album artwork by Michael Kiwanuka and hung on the walls of a small selection of galleries in East London. He’s currently working on a series of experimental floral images, and learning to write poetry. He’s also been developing a brand and clothing range called ‘More Love’, a way to cultivate and communicate the love that originates from God.
From SJB’s exhibition ‘Can We Start Again Please?’
It’s easy to be intimidated by the successes and the considerable talent of someone like Sam, but his humility and honesty in person debunks any Instagram fallacies before you even start. Being a photographer in the pressurized maelstrom of London is far from easy or glamorous, and it’s a vocation that has forced Sam to continually reevaluate what is important, what he can hope to achieve, and the best way to take care of himself and others.
Unsurprisingly, his creative process is well-thought out: earlier this year we featured his in-depth interview with Kodak on why he continues to use film, and the inner process that informs his work. You can see plenty of his work on Instagram or his website: from intimate, humanizing portraits and diaristic snaps to beautiful, abstract images.
We were privileged to feature an exclusive piece from ‘Experiments From the Garden’ in our first ever Sputnik Poetry & Visuals anthology – pick up a copy by joining Sputnik Patrons!
Welcome to our new feature, Artist of the Week, in which we celebrate faith-driven artists making work for universal audiences.
Singapore-based, award-winning multidisciplinary artist Namiko Chan Takahashi is one of Singapore’s most accomplished portrait artists; her work is found in many private international collections as well as in public institutions such as the Istana and the National Gallery of Singapore.
Namiko Chan Takahashi’s ‘Beyond Belief’, featured in Sputnik Poetry & Visuals Vol 1.
Namiko specialises in seeing the Imago Dei in every person, and portraying their dignity and beauty in her oil paintings. For example, in 2015 she launched the 10,000 Profiles Project, rendering 35-minute profile portraits of friends and perfect strangers, in order to explore the assumptions we make about people when we first see them; eventually God worked through the project to serve the Orang Asli – the indigenous people of Peninsular Malaysia.
Along with her husband – prize-winning poet, community organiser and ethics lawyer Aaron Lee – Namiko runs the Laniakea Culture Collective, and is regularly invited to conduct painting and art exploration classes for the public. As if this wasn’t enough – she now directs, teaches and dances with Singapore’s first branch of a Hawaiian Hula dance school. In short, Namiko is an astoundingly talented, hard-working and empathetic artist doing fantastic things in Singapore.
You may have missed the live debut of sing-songwriter/composer Joanna Karselis’s new EP By the Lovely Shores at Catalyst Festival, but the EP itself is available to stream/buy on Bandcamp, as well as YouTube.
By the Lovely Shores is an intimate EP documenting the heart-wrenching journey of watching a loved one struggle with dementia. It’s a fearlessly personal piece of art: Karselis lays out the experience with raw honesty, drawing empathy out of the listener and, for a moment, widening their frame on the world.
Listen to ‘Darling’, and see the cover artwork, below.
Childish Gambino’s single ‘This is America’ dropped about a month ago, to widespread debate, admiration and viral sensation. We asked guest writer and poet Jessica Wood to unpack a little of its cultural resonance and emotional impact.
I’m not sure This is America could have dropped at a better time. As opposed to Kanye’s controversial TMZ comments where he said that slavery was a choice, Childish Gambino’s new song takes an unflinching look into the current state of America, hitting on issues from gun violence to the treatment of black bodies and our complex relationship with popular culture in the 21st century.
I’m no music guru, so I can’t speak to that aspect of the song; however, I can tell you how I felt at every moment of watching the video, and hope that it translates to you some of Gambino’s intention behind what may otherwise seem to be an eclectic, raw and confusing piece.
In the opening to the video, Gambino’s dance moves had most people laughing both from humour and discomfort as he contorted his dad-bod around an abandoned factory. He’s enjoying the beat, and we are too – until he takes a gun and shoots the man to whose music he had just been dancing. The gun fires and we’re all left a little shell-shocked. But Gambino looks to the camera and says matter-of-factly, “This is America”; the gun is carefully wrapped away whilst the dead man is dragged across the floor.
In this first scene alone, Gambino sets the tone for the next four minutes of emotionally intense music and film.
The dance between enjoying the artistic and cultural products of a person, yet in the same breath being willing to end their life, is a recurring image within the video. Gambino creates a series of shifts from funny to serious that give you heart palpitations.
On first watch, your eyes can’t focus on the chaos happening in the background as you try to grasp the dance moves of Gambino and the troop of school children surrounding him; but as you watch more, and read the endless decoding articles that have flooded the internet since the video’s release, you begin to notice some of the complex symbolisms and meanings behind the chaos.
Gambino creates a series of shifts from funny to serious that give you heart palpitations
For example: Gambino’s strange body contortions reflect the character of Jim Crow, a one-time minstrel character in American minstrel show (American folk entertainment that mocked African-American people) which is used to describe the experience of segregation within Southern America into the 20th century. It’s a reflection that entertainment, through music, dance and performance, is always being pushed to the forefront of our minds, a convenient and sometimes necessary distraction from the abuse and injustice that runs rampant in society.
Amongst all this, Lady liberty herself does nothing but watch.
The experience of This is America is a very pointed and calculated critique of a country which bases itself on the values of liberty, freedom and tolerance, but doesn’t have a great track record of turning these nice words into positive action for groups and individuals.
In the closing scene, Gambino runs through a dark corridor chased by a mob. He looks terrified, and the unsettling thing is that I don’t think it would have been difficult for him to conjure up the fear in his eyes.
Apocalyptic folk artist David Benjamin Blower released his eighth record yesterday, Hymns for Nomads – a ‘compilation of spirituals, murder ballads and campfire songs’. Hymns emerged out of the process of creating meditative ‘devotional’ songs in Blower’s other guise as half of the excellent Nomad Podcast. The results are congregational songs, well suited to group singalongs – although probably more of a Tolkien-esque barroom romp than a modern church service.
These are spirituals, but there is nothing much otherworldly in ‘Hymns…’ It is a record rooted in the soil and the struggle of material reality.
This is protest music, but ‘Hymns…’ shows a different kind of defiance. These are songs of weary, bone-deep, painful resistance. And they are songs reaching beyond anger toward mercy.
This is sacred music, but ‘Hymns…’ is no benign worship record. Here are sorrow, suffering and lament alongside faith, hope and love. These are songs for lives of love, prayer and resistance.
See Blower’s live performance of ‘Watching and Waiting’ below, and check out the whole record on Bandcamp or Minor Artists.
Coventry singer-songwriter and Sputnikeer Elisha Esquivel launched her brand new ‘From the Ground Up’ EP last week. It’s a set of songs six years in the making, but it doesn’t feel overwrought – in fact it’s remarkably immediate and catchy, with production indebted to the likes of London Grammar, Ellie Goulding and Adele.
Pop music like this is a tricky thing to pull off tastefully, but Elisha manages it, particularly on the opening one-two punch of ‘Meet Me Here’ and ‘Fire and Water’ (our personal highlights). Do check out the EP on Spotify, and follow Elisha on Twitter and Instagram.
Phil and Harri Mardlin are the founders of LifeBox Theatre company, based in Bedford. Both relative latecomers to the theatrical world (at least, by the industry’s standard) they’ve nonetheless carved out a successful niche for themselves by switching between several different hats: communication training in businesses, education and healthcare; agency-style management of other actors; and of course, your meat-and-potatoes gigs acting, writing and directing.
Sputnik Patrons helped to fund the 2018 StageWrite festival, run by LifeBox Theatre – a festival for new writers which Phil and Harri have built from the ground themselves.
(L-R) Phil and Harri Mardlin.
PHIL AND HARRI exemplify the Sputnik credo: an abundantly creative, affable duo, operating at a professional level; embedded in their industry, but also dedicated to their local environment, Bedford, where they lead a Sputnik Hub thriving with poets, painters and other actors.
For Phil and Harri, work, life and faith commingle every day; with humility, they pour themselves out serving a community that is rarely on the church’s radar. And by embodying a person onstage, they can challenge an audience to new empathy and perspective, without being heavy-handed (a well-known maxim of good writing: show, don’t tell).
“We have an opportunity to be embedded in our industry, and to give people a positive experience – whatever the stage of their career.”
In conversation with the Mardlins, it’s clear that they have a deep-felt, nerdy love of their artform, and an unabashed desire for the community around it to flourish. One particular passion project of theirs shows this in crystal clarity: StageWrite, which is run in collaboration with No Loss Productions.
StageWrite: a theatre festival focused on new and undiscovered voices
“STAGEWRITE IS A festival of new writing,” Harri explains. “We invite scripts from any writers, emerging or established, to give them the opportunity to see their work performed by professional actors, in front of an audience, and to gain an understanding of how their work really sits in that context.”
“It’s the most valuable thing, to see your work in front of you, being performed by professionals,” adds Phil, principally a writer/director himself. “We bring a sense of what it might look like in a fully-realised, professional production. You realise, for example, that those 25 lines of dialogue you wrote – an actor can do with one look.
“Out of the new writing festivals that exist, not many are offering that. The feedback we get from writers is that it’s hugely valuable: they learn to hone their voice, to get their message across.”
StageWrite is a fundamentally generous endeavour on the Mardlins’ part. Not only has it been self-funded for the last four years, but in its very essence, it exists to do good for the industry, to show a helping hand to all writers, whatever their background; to encourage people, and amplify unheard voices. It has immediate benefits in some cases: three pieces from previous StageWrite years have gone on to full production and/or touring. But it also takes the long-term view that to bring Gospel life to any community means inhabiting it fully, not as a ‘project’ but as a group of fellow humans in a notoriously difficult and discouraging line of work.
StageWrite, self-funded for the last four years, is a fundamentally generous endeavour on the Mardlins’ part.
Harri considers how to summarise the project. “StageWrite represents a greenhouse, to grow new theatre, which is important. But it also provides us an opportunity to be embedded in that industry, and to give people a positive experience at our festival: directors, actors, writers – whatever stage of their career. We want to live out our professional relationships with people well. We want to honour people.”
Performers rehearse with LifeBox Theatre.
The Christ-like art of rehumanizing everyone in the room
IN A WAY, StageWrite has at its heart the same golden thread that runs through all of Phil and Harri’s work: communication. Whether they are teaching people how to communicate in a corporate setting, collaborating with actors to bring a play to life, or interacting directly with an audience, the Mardlins help people both to speak, and to listen: a distinctly Christ-like art of re-humanizing everyone in the room, showing us the face of our neighbour.
Phil: “You need to learn, as a writer, to capture your own vision so clearly that any director and a set of actors can pick up your script, and they’ll communicate what it is that you intended to communicate.
“We invite writers to come to the rehearsal of their piece, but they’re not allowed to feed into it; that’s really difficult as a writer – you’re sitting there, thinking ‘That’s not what I meant!’ But actually, that’s how the industry works: the process of submitting a script to a professional company, and having to step back.”
The same golden thread runs through all of Phil and Harri’s work: communication.
This year, our Sputnik Patrons scheme is helping Phil and Harri to fund StageWrite. After honing the list of submitted scripts down to just four, they’ll select one to take beyond just rehearsal into a more fully-realised production – and pay the actors who are taking part.
“Theatre is like no other experience,” Harri smiles. “It can’t happen without an audience; there’s an energy in live performance that doesn’t happen in other situations or mediums. You work with the audience, and off the audience as an actor: it’s an extraordinary experience that can have a very far-reaching, lasting impact.”
Help us to support StageWrite, and other artists like Phil and Harri, by becoming a monthly Patron of Sputnik.
Please could you introduce yourself- who are you and what do you do?
I’m a Hungarian artist, a painter, born and raised in Budapest. Me, my husband and our three children moved to Budaörs in 1999, on the southern outskirts of Budapest. My workshop is there, too.
I had worked as a background painter for a cartoon animation company for years, and I was really happy to be there. After our three children were born, I became a freelancer. I studied drawing, painting, typography – and later, liberal arts/religious studies and philosophy.
You work in several different styles. Can you tell us a bit about these?
How I work, what I paint, what kind of texture I use depends on what I want to express. The way I put down the strokes – especially if I use thick paint – can add extra message to the picture. On the New Song series, I gave strength to the brush strokes, but the Threshold series are the opposite in terms of technique; I only used a few gesture-like brush strokes, and few colours.
My plank-pictures series is a recent favourite, and it uses at least three different styles. One is faint, sensitive drawings adding almost nothing to the wood; one is vivid and colourful; and one icon-like series uses metallic golds and silvers.
The most important thing is that these planks are from building sites: they are old, wasted pieces of wood which are knotted, cracked and stained. They’re wounded, like us.
I don’t cover the injured part of it; rather, I put gold next to the most painful part, to emphasize it. So finally the wounded part of the wood becomes the most beautiful part of the whole. For me, that is how we are changed when we are in God’s hand.
Mozes, Dora Votin (2014)
Our readership is mainly from the English speaking world, and many of us would not know much about Hungarian artists. Who are your favourite Hungarian artists and why?
Judit Reigl and Simon Hantai would be the most known and famous ones. Reigl’s paintings are really close to my heart. Her works are powerful and reflect freedom and playfulness. There are just too many good painters and artists in Hungary. I mention only few of them.
Some contemporary artist I really appreciate: Eva Krajcsovics, Eszter Deli, Bea Zoltai, Gabor Erdelyi, Janos Aknay, Laszlo Gyemant, Laszlo Feher, Gabor Karatson, Lili Orszagh, Lajos Vajda, Endre Balint, Bela Kondor, Jeno Barcsay. – That is a long long line, already!
“I didn’t expect grace showing up from destruction [in my work]. That was a surprise.”
How does following Jesus make you a better artist and what challenges have you found being a Christian making art?
What makes the better art and artist is me, the real person, growing spiritually while following Christ, learning about God, life, myself and art.
For years I was afraid of calling myself a Christian artist. I felt it suggested my art is more a Christian thing than an art thing, and I didn’t want to reach people from that point. I didn’t want to be an old-fashioned kitsch painter, as I thought of it.
Please tell us about your ‘Removed Pictures’ project. Why did you make this and how did you come up with the idea?
‘Removed Pictures’ was created for the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, last year. Thinking about reformation I had a sense of loss as an artist, because of the re-formation of the way of looking at art.
There are seven paintings, each showing a dramatic meeting in the life of Christ. I covered each painting with white wall paint, to experience that loss. The pain of loss was part of the honest relationship with the artworks and the only way of expressing the power of destruction.
What I had not planned was that I found a joy in it, greater than the loss. I realised I got new paintings, different from the originals, built upon them; they could only function because of that original, destroyed base. For me that has spoken about grace and renewal. That was a surprise. I didn’t expect grace showing up from destruction.
What projects are you working on at the moment and what do you hope to achieve in 2018?
Right now I am preparing for the next show. The title will be Scale Change, since I am painting in three sizes – small, medium and big – to discover how I can change the scale of a piece and still preserve its quality.
To see more of Dora’s work, visit her website. (For our English speaking audience, click on the ‘English’ button in the top right hand corner).
ICYMI, Snoop Dogg recently dropped a 32-track, hand-on-heart Gospel album called ‘Bible of Love’, featuring about every big name in Gospel going, including Tye Tribbet, Fred Hammond, Faith Evans, the Clark Sisters, and many, many more. It’s now #1 on Billboard’s Gospel chart.
Although Gospel music is generally outside of the Sputnik remit, we’ve written before about the fascinating case of Christianity in American hip-hop. Snoop, unsurprisingly, has church roots – his mother, Beverley Broadus, is a travelling evangelist. While there are many different pockets of hip-hop that can’t all be pushed together, gospel music – ‘the music of black resilience and black fortitude’, as this Vulture review put it – is an inextricable influence on mainstream rap and R&B alike.
Though it’s stylistically broad, there’s little crossover in ‘Bible of Love’; it’s really a curated compilation of modern Gospel, resting entirely on your own personal taste for the genre. Musically speaking, it’s pure celebration of a subculture. But if it’s the result of Snoop’s personal journey, he keeps pretty quiet – he barely appears on the 2 hour album, which feels odd in the context. Whatever you make of it, the synergy of rap and modern gospel in the US carries on apace.
In certain circles, it’s been hard to avoid the hype for ‘A Wrinkle in Time’, Ava DuVernay’s film adaptation of a beloved children’s novel by Madeleine L’Engle; not just because of the popular source material, but because it’s the first big-budget action film to be directed by a woman of colour, its protagonist is a young mixed-race girl, and its cast features some absurdly big names. (Oprah).
L’Engle described herself as a writer first – ‘Christian is secondary’ – but the ‘A Wrinkle in Time’ novel is relatably Christian, in a very C.S. Lewis way (church-goers and publishers in the 60s, predictably, bristled against the witches and dark forces in the book). So the film is an interesting case: because despite its philosophical core, the script and the film itself have been held up as totems of liberal, post-Christian values.
We could be thankful that the project has bypassed America’s ‘Christian’ film-making machine, but it looks as though the weight of expectation may become a bit of a curse for the film instead, as many early reviews have been doling out ‘hard truths’. And interestingly, there’s an undercurrent of conversation about ironing out L’Engle’s Christian faith into weak platitudes:
The film has the feel of an iPad video pawned off on a toddler so Dad can make comforting mac and cheese – here’s a bite-sized lesson about loving yourself and a jumble of pretty colors.-The Guardian
Considering the changes that were made to the story and the schmaltzy platitudes liberally spooned out by screenwriter Jennifer Lee, one gets the feeling that she and the director either didn’t fully grasp the material or didn’t think the audience could.-Dark Horizons
It’s especially awkward around the good / evil, light / dark dichotomy, which is never really put into more relatable terms. [The book] is open about its religious imagery… [but] L’Engle never had her Mr. Murry standing in his lab shouting “Love is the frequency!” -The Verge
[L’Engle’s] intention was looking at the ordinary real hero in an extraordinary situation. The power of love in this world, and we stayed very true to that. And her lens through it was Christianity and everyone has a different lens in.
Geoff Hall is a novelist, a film maker, an arts mentor and a Christian and he is working on a new film project that you could help bring to life. We caught up with him to find out more.
Hi Geoff. Please introduce yourself…
For 15 years I was an arts mentor in Bristol with a thing we called The Group. It started when I was approached to help a student at the local arts university, when she was told that her faith was “inappropriate for a student at the college!” From one to many as it turned out, as it was the experience of quite a few art students.
We held monthly meetings to discuss spirituality and art. We’d have an artist present their work and we looked at artistic practice and discussed any problems they were having. This developed into something we called ‘The Tree House’. We started meeting in a café, eating free tapas, listening to bands, hear artists of diverse media talk about their work.
At this time I met Chris Lorensson of Upptacka Press, who decided he’d like to publish me if I’d write about mentoring work. This became a series called Spiritual Direction in a Postmodern Landscape and included juicy titles like ‘The Wilderness and the Desert of the Real’ and ‘Translating the Invisible Wind’. In future we’ll publish my new novel – a supernatural political horror story called Owl:Believe about a group of artists and hackers who take on the Corporate State.
You have a new project in development. Could you talk us through it?
Seeing Rachel came out of a dream I had. I’m told you can’t mention this to investors as they freak out about it… allegedly! I then started to develop a story about human trafficking. It took a year to write and research and the research was pretty disturbing.
Now when most people think about this genre of film, they see sensationalised violence or a kind of linear docu-drama narrative, so I decided to buck expectations and look at the psychology of the characters and their inner world. The lead roles are two female characters, by the way.
It will be shot in Bristol, a city with historical roots in slavery, but also sadly nowadays it’s a distribution hub for trafficking. People like to think it’s someone else’s problem; in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, or Thailand and Cambodia, but what I want to bring to people’s hearts is that it’s our problem. It happens in our cities. With Seeing Rachel the world of trafficking is squeezed into one location, to reveal what lies beneath the surface of even a beautiful city like Bristol.
What are your hopes and goals for the project?
We always start with raising awareness and then hope that people will become activists with the aim of eradicating modern slavery. With this in mind we’re looking for an international theatrical and digital release.
What I want to bring to people’s hearts is that trafficking isn’t someone else’s problem; it’s our problem.
We’re planning a campaign to work with NGO’s and charities, devoted to the abolition of slavery in all its forms: sexual, narcotic, indentured slavery and domestic servitude. There are great networks out there, like the worldwide community of Freedom Collaborative and the Jam Network based in London, who we’ll be looking to work with as the film moves in to production. We’re also planning on supporting a local charity in their work amongst the victims of sex trafficking.
How can people help in bringing Seeing Rachel to life?
At the moment we’re seeking development finance, so that we can start ‘packaging’ the film with a name in front of the camera. This will help attract the interests of a distribution company. Our target is £30k for this phase.
We need patrons/investors and also partners who’ll help spread the word, as we move into more interesting phases of production. We wish to find people who’ve a passion for social justice and understand that investing in a film is part of this battle and not just a bit of cultural tinsel-making.
A writer works in a lonely place. As artists we’re used to this isolation, but making the film can only be achieved through a community. Then some of the things I carry can be offloaded and shared with others. I’m looking forward to that day!
It’s been a spiritual and physical battle so far, a quite bruising affair, but you’ve got to be persistent, you have to complete the course otherwise all you’re left with is debt and you’re stuck with no place left to go! Perseverance is the key to any artistic endeavour and in particular I think with film, because it takes a lot of people to get the thing off the ground.
To find out more about Seeing Rachel, visit the film’s website. If you’d like to support the project, contact Geoff directly through the facebook page.
Patrol are an illustration studio in LA dedicated to publishing fiction and non-fiction that is loosely inspired by the Gospel. They’ve just announced a new range that they’re looking to fund via Kickstarter.
Here’s some information about the books they’re hoping to prepare and print:
The Gospel in Color
“Designed to equip parents and kids to have helpful, honest conversations on racism. These two books give a biblical perspective on race and how the good news of Jesus Christ brings about reconciliation, through rich illustrations and approachable text.”
The Moonman Cometh
“A children’s Christmas fantasy unlike any other, vividly told with rich illustrations and an engaging narrative. This book depicts the story of a boy and his dog as they seek to save their dying Christmas tree farm.”
‘Thank You Very Much George’ is more of what we’ve come to expect from the Manchester based rock outfit. On the surface, it’s all bright and breezy – playfully enigmatic lyrics and kooky pop-punk stylings – but what sets it apart is an underlying sense of menace that breaks through in occasional bursts of genuine heaviness.
How long can WDY continue banging out singles of this quality before an album materialises? If we just take the singles from the last year, we’ve already got half an album, and it’s all killer, no filler.
Mike Lawetto’s musical output over the last year has been largely through his rock band Well Done You, but, never one to settle into one groove for long, his leftfield pop project Perendiz has re-emerged with a new single ‘Down’.
Featuring Mrs Lawetto (Mike’s wife), it’s certainly a more compressed and electronic sound than WDY, but Mike’s familiar offbeat tendencies permeate as expected. Kicking things off with pounding drums and bass, overlaid with breathy near spoken word delivery, it breaks into his catchiest hook yet.
I love the internet. It can be a treasure chest of wonderful inspiration. Today I came across an absolute gem: The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrow. Oh my, what a thought-provoking project this is!
As someone who has started to write poetry I have become aware of the challenges we face as human beings in recording our thoughts, our emotions and our deepest longings in the limited vocabulary of whichever language we speak. We have hundreds of thousands of words to choose from, yet how often, when faced with the extremes of our life experiences, do we find ourselves admitting ‘there are no words’? John Koenig has set out to fill this gap – to create new words that capture those deeply profound moments.
One of my favourite phrases from his dictionary is ‘Moment of Tangency’. He defines this as ‘a glimpse of what might have been’, and explains that it is about lives lived in parallel. The video that he has created to explore this concept is beautiful yet bittersweet. Watching it makes you realise how much more there could be, and how insular our own lives are in this vast world of humanity that we inhabit.
What I also love about John’s project is that he has created a feast of inspiration for creative writers. Take the word ‘flashover’ for example. He defines it as ‘the moment a conversation becomes real and alive, which occurs when a spark of trust shorts out the delicate circuits you keep insulated under layers of irony, momentarily grounding the static emotional charge you’ve built up through decades of friction with the world’. How many short stories or poems could that generate? Plus it is so beautifully written. I adore the phrase ‘decades of friction with the world’ – again, that just sparks the imagination and helps to birth ideas for new characters and situations.
There is so much I could say in praise of this dictionary. I know I will be visiting it often, drawing on the amazing creativity and insight of this man. For now though, I want to thank him for coming up with the word ‘sonder’. I often sit in coffee shops or restaurants and wonder about the life stories of the people around me. How have they arrived in the same place as me? Where are they going? Who else do they connect to? John created the word ‘sonder’ to describe that experience, but he does it in a far more poetical way than I ever could. I salute him for it.
Sonder – ‘the realization that each random passer-by is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.’
I have had several animated conversations with my good friend Huw Evans about the pros and cons of rhyme in poetry. On the whole, The pros have come from me, the cons from Huw. I recognise that it is hard for me to approach this objectively when my favourite artform, rap, is synoymous with this particular poetic device. To rap is to rhyme. I was never going to roll over on this one.
However, even with that bias, over the years, Huw has talked to me round when it comes to rhyme and written poetry and he has very helpfully put together a simple little video outlining his beef with rhyming and justifying such extreme statements as the one quoted above. It’s here, and it’ll take a mere 5 minutes of your time…
If you’ve made it to this paragraph without watching the video, I’ll give you a taster, before you scroll up again. Huw’s basic argument goes like this. Rhyme clearly has a function in poetry but it can cause more problems than it solves, especially when it comes to ‘meandering meaning and mangled syntax’. Poets should resist the urge for the easy rhyme, and if they find their meaning being driven by the rhyme, or it leading to a particularly ‘grotesque word order’, they should search harder for a different rhyme or change the phrase they’re trying to rhyme with. In short, a decent rule of thumb is:
‘If… a rhyme seems to be taking away from the meaning or needs a weird word ordering, get rid of it!’
With all that said, though, if you’d like some balance to the argument, or perhaps, like me, if you have such a connection to sonic symmetry in your lyrical diet, that all of this anti-rhyme talk makes you feel slightly uneasy, let’s end with something to restore your faith in ryhme. In short, kids, be careful of rhyme unless you can rhyme like this 😉
Huw is releasing a poetry collection in late Spring, which Sputnik is supporting as part of our Patrons Scheme, to hear more from Huw about his work or to find out more about the patronage, check out the Sputnik Patrons page.
Last week we caught up with Keir Shreeves on the back of his booklet ‘Art for Mission’s Sake’. However, Keir is only half of team Shreeves. Jessamy Shreeves is an artist and the founder of Christian arts festival ‘Thou Art’, and today, it’s over to her.
Hi Jessamy, who are you and what do you do?
I’m someone who is having a messy but fun go at following Jesus. At this stage of my life, I’m also doing a lot of following toddlers (I have a busy three-year-old who I’m always chasing, mostly with my 4-month-old baby dangling in one arm). I studied History of Art and English Lit at Edinburgh University but always got a bit of cash in from painting (mostly portraits). Via art school, a digital start up and trying my hand as a headhunter, I then found my way towards fundraising, which I now do for a number of charities as a consultant. I still paint though – a few commissions, but mostly for pleasure- or because I get itchy fingers if I don’t!
How do you and Keir work together in your artistic pursuits?
Our mutual interest in creativity and faith is one of the things that drew us together. We first went on a date after getting to know each other when I was organising an exhibition in the church where Keir was working. He came over and said “I’d love to take you out for lunch” and I turned to the whole hanging team and said: “Everyone, Keir is very kindly taking us out for lunch!”
Broadly speaking Keir’s the thinker and I’m the doer. Keir’s got a perfectionist streak whereas I just tend to go for things and hope that optimism and a few late nights mean I’ll pull them off!
When we first met we realised we both have bi-polar bookshelves. Stuff like The Art of Looking Sideways by Alan Fletcher, Buckminster Fuller books & Scottish Colourist catalogues on one side and the Bible, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Phillip Yancey on the other. Until recently there hasn’t been much to plug the gap- but now the tide is turning and it feels like the arts are coming back into playing their part in announcing the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Thou Art Festival
Tell us about ‘Thou Art’. What is it? How did it come about? How is it different from other exhibitions/festivals?
Thou Art is part exhibition, part gig, part festival- a general celebration of creativity and its source.
Beauty has always helped me connect with God. When I was at university I found other people who felt the same, so we ended up doing a few exhibitions of the art we’d made and inviting our friends who weren’t into God stuff to see.
Thou Art was a natural extension of this- putting our art into God’s epic art work (a stunning, wild garden) so you might find a Nick Fiddian-Green huge bronze head of Christ amidst the bluebells, bump into an insightful portrait peeping round a tree, spot a bike-powered cinema in a bush or hear some fresh new music as you enjoy a local cider.
“The tide is turning – the arts are coming back into playing their part in announcing the gospel of Jesus Christ.”
There seem to be loads of festival type things for Christians and obviously lots which are in no way Christian, but there doesn’t seem to be a space to just ‘taste and see that the Lord is good’- to hang out with people who are trying to love like Jesus did, to experience art work that points to God, to be in a place that is beautiful but comfortable, normal but prayed in, and open oneself up a bit.
Thou Art Festival
How do you hope that the world will be a little different through ‘Thou Art’?
I guess just a little more colourful, creative and open. At the last Thou Art, an atheist friend of mine was moved to tears looking at a sculpture down by the lake. I don’t know what was going on for him but I hope it was a helpful release of emotions and engagement with his feelings at the very least.
For those who aren’t into God stuff, I hope it’s a chance to encounter something of God’s love, beauty & truth- whether that’s through the people, the artwork, the music or the garden itself. And for those who already know and love Jesus, I hope that the arts help them find new depths, get beyond the rational and into a new place of freedom, acceptance and joy.
Thou Art Festival
How can artists get involved with ‘Thou Art’?
Have a look at www.thou-art.org and if you are interested please do make contact, telling me what you and your work are about and pinging a few images and the curating team and I would love to have you involved I’m sure!
Last week, we posted about Keir Shreeves’ excellent booklet ‘Art for Missions Sake’, a helpful introduction to some of the points of intersection between the arts and the church. Behind the booklet is not just the author though, but a husband and wife team, who are well experienced in these matters and we thought it would be great to catch up with both of them to pick their brains further. Today, we’re starting with Keir, and next week, we’ll let Jessamy have her say.
So, Keir, introduce yourself…
I’m on the clergy team at St Peter’s Brighton and pursuing doctoral studies in theology. I previously studied theology at St Mellitus College and King’s College London. I’m also Chair of Shift (www.shift-uk.com). Before ordination, I qualified as an Industrial Designer and had a career in manufacturing management. I’m married to Jessamy, a painter, and together we have two young children.
The ‘Art For Missions Sake’ booklet is concise but packed with a great depth of understanding about the arts and their place within the church. What has your experience been of art and the church and the mysterious place where the two things meet (or perhaps don’t!)?
My background is Design and Dieter Rams is my favourite designer. I studied Industrial design being part of the last cohort to train at a little campus of Brunel University in Runnymede, Surrey, which closed in 2004 and which we all considered to be our own Bauhaus. After graduating I project managed the acquisition and relocation of a company that makes the London Underground signs, re-designing the manufacturing process. Whilst I was on the Senior Management Team of the company, God called me into full-time Christian ministry. After studying theology, being ordained and on the back of conversations with my wife Jessamy (who is a great thinker and practitioner of art in mission) I became fascinated about theological aesthetics. The booklet is one of the results. It’s a recapitulation of my Master’s dissertation. I’m grateful that I’ve always been in churches that haven’t been suspicious of the arts but I’ve also been aware of a general lack of theological confidence; it’s that, which I hope the booklet might spark in some small way.
What I really like about the booklet is that it contains both why and how the church should engage with the arts. If you could deal with the ‘why’ first: in short, why do you think this is such a big deal?
The wonder of the arts is that they can take us beyond conventional or established patterns of reason, drawing with a subversive quality. When words might bounce off, image, music or drama can impact in a different way with evangelism coming as something of a surprise. However, the arts have been a neglected theme in the life and mission of the evangelical church because of its Protestant roots and its residual mistrust of art, especially the visual. William Dyrness, Professor of Theology and Culture at Fuller Theological Seminary, warns: ‘It is possible that we might actually win the battle of words but lose the battle of images. And losing that battle could well cost us this generation.’ Thankfully, the evangelical church has increased its engagement with the arts over the last fifteen to twenty years and this booklet seeks to help support this by offering theological foundations, a consideration of the role of the artist in the church and the world, and examples of how the creative arts are faithfully contributing to Christian mission.
“whilst the arts are non-utilitarian, they are also a wonderful starting point for many in a journey of faith”
As regards the ‘how’ then. If you could outlaw one common practice in churches and enforce one new practice, both in a bid to improve the church’s engagement with the arts, what would they be and why?
I would outlaw treating the arts as purely decorative because whilst the arts are non-utilitarian, they are also a wonderful starting point for many in a journey of faith, something Hans Urs von Balthasar and Tom Wright affirm. One thing I would encourage is artists and church leadership teams working together to evoke wonder because in doing so we bear witness to the deep reality of something more.
How can we get our hands on ‘Art for Mission’s Sake’ and who is it specifically for?
You can purchase a print copy or digital copy for only £3.95 here.
It’s aimed at artists in the church and those in leadership positions in the church. Whilst, the booklet seeks to encourage artists by affirming their value, it also urges church leaders to support a fresh generation of artists in expressing passion, pain, hope and glory in both the church and the world.
Newcastle-based mononymous artist Richard has published his Immaculata Cosmica project online; a collection of collages combining classic images from religious art history with images of space. Richard explains:
Immaculata Cosmica (The Immaculate Cosmos) invites you… to explore that inner universe, the inner cosmos that is within us all and its relation to our creator God in a series of artworks and collaged material that ponders on these questions of 1. What is God doing and creating inside of us? and 2. How does this relate to and connect us to the world we occupy?
Richard’s ‘Pecha Kucha’ presentation of the project was one of the highlights of the arts study day we attended at the Holy Biscuit in Newcastle, and we’re glad to see it’s now available to all. See this intriguing set of image at their online home, here.
London-based conceptual artist – and friend of Sputnik – Katriona Beales takes a considered look at internet addiction and digital capitalism in her latest exhibition, ‘Are We All Addicts Now?’ The exhibition is open at Furtherfield, London, until this Sunday, but you can also buy the accompanying book here.
This excellent interview by Studio International delves into Katriona’s thoughts behind the project, where she talks about making visible the invisible, drawing the viewer’s attention to pathological behaviours that have been normalised, and the intentionally coercive behavioural psychology that lies behind the simple idea of a device being ‘addictive’.
Watch Furtherfield’s explanation of the project, below:
Joining the recent trend for tastefully-designed, hardback Bibles is the stunning ESV Illuminated Bible, with over a hundred full-page illustrations (in gold, no less) by renowned Seattle-based illustrator Dana Tanamachi. While obviously a project for the Christian market, Tanamachi’s previous work has been featured by Google, The Wall Street Journal, and plenty of others.
Tanamachi and her team describe the seven-month project, commissioned by Crossway, as a throwback to the Middle Age-practice of illumination – the painstaking illustration of Bible manuscripts typically undertaken by monks, which fell out of favour and practice after the Reformation and invention of the printing press.
A couple of weeks ago, ‘Sign of the Times’ arrived in my inbox. It’s a collaboration between long time Sputnik favourite, Mike Lawetto, and Dan Crook. Dan is a singer songwriter and spoken word artist from Southend-on-sea, whose passionate folky sound has always threatened to brim over into something a little more visceral. Well, the new single does just that and is one of my favourite songs of the year so far. Obviously, this called for an introduction to Mr Crook for Sputnikmagazine…
Introduce yourself. Who is Dan Crook?
Morning Sputnik. How long you got?! I love being the centre of attention (too much so). I’m a songwriter, I’m a husband, I work for or with young people most days, I like an extra cold Guiness, I’m inspired daily by Jesus, I’m a big West Ham United fan and I live in Southend-on-sea.
Musically, I’m currently performing around Essex with a loop pedal and my electric guitar.
What does success look like to you as an artist?
Writing and releasing music that I still stand by a year after releasing it. I’d also really like to tour 2 months every year, opening for artists that make great music.
How does your faith affect your art?
I believe God created nature and I believe humans are made in his image so i believe creativity is a gift from him.
If we have a smidgeon of the creative power God used when he created clouds…That should give us all confidence.
I was really impressed with the Uppah Records Christmas project in 2015, when they released 3 very different festive songs, including one by yourself. How did that project come about and what’s Uppah up to at the moment?
I was invited to be one of their first artists when they started out and jumped on it. I had a lot of fun making Christmas Lights and those months around December were my favourite times with the label. It’s been a year since we last collaborated, so I’m not up to date!
Your back catalogue is reasonably diverse and your music is often passionate and direct. However, your new project seems to take this up a notch. Talk us through the change of style on ‘Sign of The Times’.
I know vocally it’s the harshest thing I’ve put out but it doesn’t feel like a huge shift. I’ve ostracised plenty of potential fans at solo gigs cos I sing too aggressively- just ask my dear mum. For some reason it’s much more accepted to sing like that when you call yourself a rock outfit…
Mike (Lawetto) has always encouraged me to ‘give it some’ vocally when we record together which I’ve really appreciated.
Both of us love guitars/rock music and so we have found ourselves naturally inclining to write tracks like Sign of the Times.
What have CROOK & LAWETTO got in store for us in the future?
We’ve got a least one more big track coming your way before Christmas. If someone wants to fund us touring, we’re game for that too.
What 3 things have you learnt from your journey so far as a Christian making art that you’d want to share with other Christian artists?
I would say this to any artist, regardless of their beliefs- be authentic in what you write about, be confident in your ability to create something original (see question 3 ) and don’t compromise what you believe for the sake of opportunities. Ultimately music is one part of life- a person’s integrity is much more important.
Thanks Dan. To keep in touch with what’s Dan’s up to…
To go directly to the tunes, check him out on Spotify and there are a few gems floating around on youtube too. I’ll leave you with this one. Thanks Dan.
What on earth is going on in hip hop in 2017? There will be some to whom that question may seem a bit niche (and who may well answer ‘who cares?’), but to others, the names in the title of this post will be very familiar to you, and you will have already clocked where I’m going with this one.
In 2017, two of hip-hop’s most respected and commercially successful artists are Chance the Rapper and Kendrick Lamar. ‘Damn’ by Kendrick has, to this point, sold over half a million units, and its songs have been streamed about a squillion times. Chance’s 2016 album (mixtape, if you’re being picky) ‘Coloring Book’ is harder to pin down regarding commercial performance as it was available as a free download, but it was the first streaming only album to win a grammy and was on pretty much everyone’s album of the year list last year. The two releases are also notable for the fact that they both have Christianity and the Bible all over them. Hip hop and R&B albums are well known for their token Jesus songs, but these guys aren’t just giving an occasional nod to God, in the manner of Puff Daddy’s ‘Best Friend’ or even Kanye West’s ‘Jesus Walks‘. They are putting their perceived relationships with God and theological viewpoints at the centre of their work. And secular hiphop fandom is loving it.
If you’d like a fuller explanation of what I mean, this recent article on major rap blog DJBooth will fill you in . If you’re not yet gripped enough to invest a click though, the very fact that a blog that calls itself ‘The Authority On Hiphop’ (with good reason) would put up a feature piece dissecting the nuances of these guys’ Christian spirituality is notable.
But here’s where things get really weird, fun, exciting, magnificent or even troubling (depending on who you’re talking to). Kendrick himself sent DJBooth a message expressing his appreciation for the article and outlining in more detail how his Christian faith and art intersect. The full story is here, but I wanted to print the whole message on this post, just in case you hip-hop skeptics are STILL scrolling on auto pilot. This is what he wrote (unabridged, except for my added emphases):
Long time no talk. Congrats on the work. Honored to say I still enjoy the write ups. Y’all accuracy lets me know this site has a deep respect for the culture. Much appreciated.
Your latest read is really interesting to me. I didn’t expect anyone to catch it. How I express God. I went to a local church some time ago, and it appalled me that the same program was in practice. A program that I seen as a kid the few times I was in service. Praise, dance. Worship. (Which is beautiful.) Pastor spewing the idea of someone’s season is approaching. The idea of hope. So on and so forth.
As a child, I always felt this Sermon had an emptiness about it. Kinda one sided, in what I felt in my heart. Fast forward. After being heavily in my studies these past few years, I’ve finally figured out why I left those services feeling spiritually unsatisfied as a child. I discovered more truth. But simple truth. Our God is a loving God. Yes. He’s a merciful God. Yes. But he’s even more so a God of DISCIPLE. OBEDIENCE. A JEALOUS God. And for every conscious choice of sin, will be corrected through his discipline. Whether physical or mental. Direct or indirect. Through your sufferings, or someone that’s close to [sic] ken. It will be corrected.
Hence the concept “The wages of sin is Death.” It shall be corrected. As a community, we was taught to pray for our mishaps, and he’ll forgive you. Yes, this is true. But he will also reprimand us as well. As a child, I can’t recall hearing this in service. Maybe leaders of the church knew it will run off churchgoers? No one wants to hear about karma from the decisions they make. It’s a hard truth. We want to hear about hope, salvation, and redemption. Though his son died for our sins, our free will to make whatever choice we want, still allows him to judge us.
So in conclusion, I feel it’s my calling to share the joy of God, but with exclamation, more so, the FEAR OF GOD. The balance. Knowing the power in what he can build, and also what he can destroy. At any given moment.
I love when artists sing about what makes Him happy. My balance is to tell you what will make Him extinguish you. Personally, once that idea of real fear registered in my mind, it made me try harder at choosing my battles wisely. Which will forever be tough, because I’m still of flesh. I wanna spread this truth to my listeners. It’s a journey, but it will be my key to the Kingdom. And theirs as well. I briefly touched on it in this album, but when he tells me to react, I will take deeper action.
So thank you for your great work. It inspired me to reply with this long ass message. Hopefully, you’ll take the time to read mines like I do yours.
So, why is the biggest rapper in the world right now making music? ‘To share the joy of God, but with exclamation, more so, the FEAR OF GOD’. I’m not sure Biggie or Tupac would have put it quite like that 20 years ago!
Now, hopefully, you can all see why I think this may be news even to those of you whose hip-hop knowledge doesn’t stretch past the first line of the Fresh Prince theme tune. That is quite some claim.
Would I then recommend all and sundry to go and check out Kendrick’s ‘Damn’? Umm… kind of… not really… er… not sure. On route to a wedding the other day, a friend of mine decided to play a car full of friends a certain track off the album, prefaced with the rather mischievious half truth that this is one of my favourite songs. As a church leader of all those in the car, I had to do a short round of ‘pastoral check ups’ while queuing for the hog roast after the service to clarify my position on said track, which starts with Kendrick’s voice sampled, repeating ‘I don’t give a f-‘ and features a chorus that I hope is talking about beating up an adversary who is somewhat challenged in his expression of traditional standards of masculinity (believe me, the possible alternative is far worse).
I am personally pretty puzzled as to what to make of all of this, and in a sense am still withholding judgement. With that said though, for two of the major players in rap to be inciting this sort of theological dialogue is remarkable and surely, at the very least, fascinating. At a time when ‘Christian Hip Hop’ is making itself busy bickering about exactly the correct way to go about (or not to go about) evangelism (Here. Sigh!), I wonder whether Jesus is, not for the first time, making his home with those ‘outside the camp’.
Personally, like Kendrick, I’m waiting for (and praying for) the moment when God tells him ‘to react’. The mind boggles as to what ‘deeper action’ he will then take!
After a three year wait, we at Sputnik Magazine have been very excited to receive the new album ‘Crooked’ by Jason Emmanuel Petty’s (a.k.a Propaganda)
Having received positive reviews for his last album ‘Crimson Cord’ and reaching number 13 in the Billboard US Independent Album chart, I was concerned that Propaganda would have softened his approach in order to find more commercial success with ‘Crooked’. Humble Beast, the independent label Propaganda plays a large part in, is undeniably ‘Christian’ and have recently announced they will now operate as a non-profit ministry (rather than a business) in order to partner more closely with local churches in their mission. Their focus is explicitly the communication of the Gospel to a post-Christian world. And so, a question that often bounces about the Sputnik Collective is, “Are these guys the real deal, Christians who are creating music to be listened to by non-Christian hip-hop fans, or is Humble Beast another way of Christians making more in-house Christian culture, by the church and for the church?”
Well, these two fears of mine were quieted by the end of the first track ‘Crooked Way’, a hard-hitting 6 minute lyrical tirade against the malformations within the contemporary Western culture he simultaneously inhabits and forms a part of. With no catchy hook, this track sets out a manifesto for the following 12 full length tracks:
“We stay perplexed at the truth that defies logic but, who says logic’s the best way to understand it// man, that’s the thinking of our colonisers, truth is proven only through ears and eyes and// if you can’t touch it, you can’t trust it, that’s why they can’t explain the love in my daughter’s eyes and// that’s that conscious rap, oh thats played out, you old school, you old dude, you aged out//its not cool them old rules they fazed out…”
As with Propaganda’s former albums we find spoken word sets sprinkled throughout. Track 2 ‘Complicated’ is quite typical of Petty’s lesser known tracks: a verbal feast of uplifting and self-analysing verbiage that exalts the contradictory nature of humanity, the great heights coupled with the lowest depths, exclaiming,
“You are heavens’s hand made calligraphy slumming it among papyrus fonts”.
In this, Propaganda, like with Crimson Cord and Excellent (2012), offers hope and glory in the midst of “messy, uncomfortable and complicated” lives.
Akin to Excellent’s tongue-in-cheek ‘Excellent Analogy ’ is another witty spoken word, ‘I Hate Cats’. This tale of a conservative Father’s displeasure at his daughter adopting a cat begins in the form of a stand up comedian luring his audience into his account with truisms and relatable comments. The soft jazz soundscape and generous studio laughter brings the listener to agree with the story-teller’s dilemma. As the narrative continues, the racial overtones become glaringly obvious as it becomes clear that the word ‘cat’ is being used with a twofold meaning. Our comfortable chuckle becomes nervous laughter as we realise how light-hearted preferential comments can soon become generalisations that spring forth prejudices about another people group we live beside.
“I don’t see species. My baby-sitter, when i was a kid, you see, she had a cat, and I am sure there are nice God-fearing people who have cats in their house, its just not in my home, see they stink… to be honest I thought I raised her better than that, see we are a dog family, we stick to our own kind, why couldn’t you love a dog? This is just the voice of a concerned father, see?”
In this album we are brought into different levels of comfort and discomfort as the artist analyses the urban world around his listeners. For example, ‘Gentrify’ is comprised of a latin jazz beat accompanied with Hispanic street shouting and a catchy hook that I found myself half guiltily joining in with. Those who are aware of Petty’s background, from a black family in a latino neighbourhood will be able to imagine the rapper’s second sense of dislocation as he sees the culture he has come to love commodified while the members themselves are pushed out from their neighbourhoods into further deprivation.
“Man those gastro pubs and clean streets ain’t good enough, they want yours// despite your crime rate y’all got prime real estate// continuing Columbus and they coming for your portion// planting their flag like that’s my land I licked it// brother it’s just business, your economy could use a boost// you know the truth your unemployment’s through the roof…”
For those who know Prop’s back catalogue, there are certain gems that relate as far back asj 2011’s collaboration with Odd Thomas ’Art Ambidextrous’. I love this throughout Propaganda’s work and I feel as though he is never ‘recreating himself’ but always developing, turning back in order to keep moving forward. And for those fans who have followed his work, we feel as if we are part of that journey too.
The final track is where we may expect to find hope in the self-proclaimed Christian’s journey through human brokenness, and being titled ‘Made-straight’ I expected the ‘one-size-fits-all’ Christian answer to come to solve all our problems. Yet…
“Life is not a comic book, there are no perfect victims or villains, just us, we are smog-laced oxygen tanks tossed to capsize murderers, resting on his power of deliverance and the integrity to accomplish it”.
The gritty track doesn’t bring a happily-ever-after but rather magnifies and focuses in on the magnitude of humanity’s crooked dilemma- in the face of being a Christian. Although there is a hint of newfound triumph in this track, ‘Made-straight’ doesn’t strike me as false or feigned as an early Lecrae track might. Propaganda’s crookedness does not paint a bleak picture of the world in order to thrust Churchianity’s remedy in the face of the listener in typical evangelistic style: there is no unnatural focus on a purely ‘spiritual’ brokenness, but this brokenness in complete and whole: social, political, moral, and spiritual. Propaganda is concerned with the breadth and depth of our crookedness, not just a ‘thin view of sin’ but a full-bodied representation of our “theologically thick sin” (as we explored a bit more here).
Although I have only focused on a few tracks, I fully recommend the whole album to anyone interested in conscious rap. But I guess the question is: will this album find its way on to non-Christian’s ipods? I think it will, and most of the material will make a lot of sense to those outside the church. The two contemporary albums ‘Crooked’ reminds me of most are Lecrae’s collaborative ‘Church Clothes 3’ (2016, on which Propaganda gets a significant feature) and Andy Mineo’s ‘Uncomfortable’ (2015), both from Reach Records. ‘Crooked’ is sure to challenge and trouble both believers and non-believers alike with its incisive remarks and hope-filled exhortations. I confess that I am a particular fan of both Humble Beast and Propaganda, but the label is yet to see the level of commercial success outside of the church that Lecrae has recently found with Reach Records. Perhaps Crooked could become their first mainstream success?
Have you noticed the days elongating in a very satisfying manner? Wouldn’t it be good if there was some new music to accompany this happy seasonal change? Well, rarely are a band as well named as Midsummer. The Mellor family has just been on holiday and Midsummer’s new album ‘The Stories You Tell’ even managed to bring joy to a ponderous crawl up the M5. I caught up with Chris to fill us in on all things Midsummer.
Do introduce the band, Chris…
Midsummer is a band/collective of 6 musicians based in Birmingham. We’re acoustic singer-songwriters with a folk edge.
Our songwriting core is Chris Taylor (me) and Lizzy Daniel-Sam. Lizzy’s the main singer, although I sing on a few songs too. I also play guitar, mandolin and percussion. Then there’s Ben Kyte (bass), Jenny Chen (violin), J Clay (trumpet and percussion) and Andy Gordon (guitar, accordion, ukulele and pretty much everything else). Everyone joins in on the singing too!
How did Midsummer come about?
At the end of 2014 Lizzy and I got a small band together to play some folky carols as a one-off at the Oasis Church carol service. It was really good fun and worked well. Afterwards, Danielle Wilson asked if we’d be up for supporting her band Eeek! at a gig the following October. We didn’t have a set or any original songs, but since it was 10 months away it seemed like a fun challenge and we said yes!
So we spent the next 6 months or so writing songs together and building a short set. Our original band from the carol service was made up of students who were coming to the end of their time in Birmingham, so in August we started to gather a new set of musicians, mainly from church and from other bands I’d played with in the past.
The gig with Eeek! went well and Lizzy and I carried on writing songs together and looking for gigs and things went from there.
Oasis Church, Birmingham seems to propel musicians into the local music scene more effectively than any other church I’ve come across (The Broken. Joanna Karselis. Thinktank. Ticking Boxes. You guys) What’s your church’s secret?
Firstly, I think collaboration and helping each other out is a big part of it. Out of the bands/artists you’ve mentioned, we’ve all been in other bands together, played with each other live or remixed each other’s music.
Secondly, I also think we help inspire each other as to what can be achieved. When Thinktank recorded their triple EPs Faith, Hope and Love, I saw Rod and Collin taking their time over it to make it as good as they could. If I hadn’t already seen someone I know do that, it would have been hard to have the vision to write and record the Midsummer album.
Thirdly, Impact definitely plays a big part too. (Ed: Impact is the live music promotion team that has come out of the church). Although Impact doesn’t exist to promote Christian musicians, we’ve all played at Impact gigs, and they’re useful stepping stones to try out new ideas, show other people what we can do, and to use as a platform to get other gigs (as well as being really good events in their own right).
And finally, Oasis Church is also good at inviting its musicians to be creative within church life. I’m particularly thinking about the carol services where we’ve been invited to create something different – you never know where that could lead.
I know that the album has gone through a lot of honing and crafting, and Chris, I hope you don’t mind, but you have a bit of a reputation as a perfectionist. What advice can you give on how to make a good album even better?
First off, I don’t think of myself as a perfectionist(!) But some things I think helped improve the album are:
We practised the songs a lot, gigged with them and made demo tracks before recording. That helped us to know our parts and the feel and flow of the song before we started recording.
Once we decided to record 10 songs, we set a deadline for a release date. I worked backwards from there to work out when we needed to finish each stage of the process and worked hard to meet those deadlines.
When we were mixing the songs we spent a lot of time going through them with a fine tooth-comb, but we also regularly took a step back to listen to the whole thing to make sure it still worked as a whole.
We compared the sound to other records we liked and we asked for feedback from people we knew who we felt could give an objective opinion.
I’m really proud of the album, and I’m also aware of its limitations. There was a phrase someone posted in the Sputnik group, which I really liked: ‘finished, not perfect’, and it was really helpful to keep that in mind as we were getting towards the end of the project.
Talk us through the album then. What are your influences? What themes do you explore in the songs?
When Lizzy and I started writing, I really wanted to write songs like Frank Turner, which everyone can sing along to. Lizzy had wanted to sing songs like Eva Cassidy. I think you can hear those influences a little. But we also sound a bit like early Mumford and Sons, Goodnight Lenin and maybe Fleetwood Mac’s Buckingham/Nicks songwriting partnership.
The things we write about tend to be a search for home, dealing with loss and enjoying community; there’s an underlying sense of hope in most of our songs.
Can you break down one of the songs on the album for us?
The idea behind the song ‘Summer’s Over’ was sparked by Pip Piper’s film ‘Mountain Biking – The Untold British Story’, and the interview with mountain biker Martyn Aston. After breaking his back he thought he’d never ride again, but was able to find a way to keep riding. He said ‘I never knew, on the day I had my accident, my best day on a bike was yet to come’. It’s a really inspiring story. Something he said ‘you don’t know what lies ahead, you only know what’s happening in this moment’. That line became the heart of the song.
Thanks Chris. And thanks Midsummer.
To get a flavour of the music, ‘You Got It Then’ is free to stream to your heart’s content:
If you’ve been checking this blog for any length of time, I’m sure Chris Donald will be familiar to you. He is a key part of the Sputnik team and I thought it was about time we caught up with him to spill the beans on his art, Minor Artists and his newest musical project Strange Ghost.
Who are you and what do you do, Chris?
I’m a 30 year old human, a lapsed capitalist, an introvert who loves company, a confused over-thinker. I write and produce music, run a record label, try to be a good friend, husband and brother, write music reviews (and occasional fiction) and I’m a self-employed graphic designer. That makes me sound super busy, but they’re all pretty slow paced. I regularly confess to the cultural sin of not being busy.
What is success to you as an artist?
Success at the moment is making and sharing something in a way that gets beyond the roles of product and a consumer. For the player and the listener to see each other as equally complex people who are generously giving each other their time in that moment of performance (or re-played performance). A human moment and not just a commercial transaction. That doesn’t have to be deeply profound or gut-wrenching, but simply getting outside the pre-defined roles and platforms is surprisingly difficult, even just in my own head. At the same time, I’m always drawn to crafting something of a high quality and beauty – it’s so simple it’s almost redundant, but success is making something that I would honestly want to listen to. I think it’s possible to do that without it becoming some elitist or self-negating exercise.
https://vimeo.com/200556641
Tell us about Minor Artists. What is it and how can people get involved?
Minor Artists is a record label that puts out unconventional, non-church music made by Christians (check website here). We tell stories of oppression, injustice, revelation or mystery; avoid the Christian vernacular as best we can; keep you on your toes like Christ’s parables did, and sound great doing it. We’re also trying to level the field between musicians and their audience. Part of how we do that is the Record Club, a ‘per-product’ subscription service; essentially you agree to pre-order two or three albums across the course of a year. And that makes it possible for us to properly commit to making them. It’s an experiment. I hope subscribers feel personally engaged with it; at the least, we’re trying to re-frame this transaction that’s taking place. I appreciate it’s weird to subscribe to music you’ve never heard bStrut I think a certain type of listener will really like that, and will trust that we’re going to make it interesting. And perhaps now that we have the history of recorded music at our fingertips, we’ll want to reclaim a bit of personal investment in the music we buy. That’s my hope, anyway.
(The video above will fill you in on all the details and how to get involved)
What would you like to see change among Christian artists and artistry?
I’d love to see more reaction to the absolute absurdity of our times. Since the abject failure of modernism, Western culture is like Wile E. Coyote running off a cliff, pretending the ground’s not gone beneath it. We want what’s good for the economy, but we can’t answer why that even matters. The West is absurd, and in constant crisis. Our art is going to need to be disruptive, because Jesus is disruptive. He’s not the icing on the bourgeois cake. I don’t mean disruptive in a ‘Modern Art’ way, where we absolve ourselves of responsibility for answers, or can’t be understood by your average observer. Quite the opposite. Disruptive storytelling can be fantastic art – the film ‘Get Out’ being a recent example.
You balance out earning a living from your creative skills and working on more self-initiated and passion projects. How do you find this balance?
Paradoxically, when I have lots of work it’s easier to find time for other things. When I’m low on work, it’s hard to do passion projects because I’m stressed about my income, even though I technically have the time. But I’m sure anyone self-employed knows about these crazy mind games. I don’t think the balance is much different from, say, going part-time to raise a kid. We all do recognise that the relationship between being paid for something, and that something being actually valuable to us, or society, is pretty weak. A YouGov poll said 37% of UK workers think their own job is pointless – I often think of Ron Livingston in ‘Office Space’, who finds salvation from his mindless tech job in becoming a construction worker. Surely people want to trade their time for something they care about, but I assume they feel like they can’t.
I’m not pretending I could just waltz into a high-paying job tomorrow, but ultimately I make a choice to value time more than money. I want to be radically generous like Christ, but I’d rather have lots of time to give to people than lots of money. But it’s easy to forget my own story. When I get swallowed by the neoliberal capitalist story, I begin to doubt myself.
Your latest project is ‘Strange Ghost’, a collaboration between you and your wife Wumi. How did this come about and what are your plans for this?
Wumi has a fantastic voice, and I’m sure we chatted about making music pretty early on in our relationship – which makes it sound so simple! It’s a new and intimidating thing for Wumi, and for my part I had a creatively tough spell while we were living in London. So it’s come about with a lot of deliberation and time. I think the time has been worth it, as I’m much clearer on what this project is for. I’ve had so many projects burn or fizzle out; I want Strange Ghost to be a vehicle for us to make music the rest of our lives – so, to be honest, I am just enjoying having completed the first step. As a friend said to me yesterday, if I had £20,000 for PR we could be famous next week, but as it is, I’m just going to share it and enjoy it, start figuring out how we might play this stuff live, and in what context we’d do that.
Thanks Chris. The Strange Ghost EP ‘Stagger’ is out on 18th May and we are proud to be among the first to announce that the first song is live to stream from this very page! Check it out, and save up your pennies for Thursday.
If you’ve been checking out the blog over the last week or so, you’ll be up to date with Pip Piper’s past– the journeys he’s been on and some of the lessons he’s learnt along the way. To finish our interview, I wanted to find out a bit more about the present and future for Pip.
You head up two companies: Blue Hippo Media and One Small Barking Dog. What do the Hippo and the Dog have in common and how are they different?
Sounds like we are running a small zoo!
Ok. So OSBD began out of the youth work I was doing at Riverside church, Birmingham back in the 1990’s. At the time I felt there was very little around media wise that helped youth workers communicate with both young people inside and more importantly outside of the church. After finishing work with the church in 1997, OSBD really began to take root.
It was just on the cusp of the digital revolution and we were making short films around issues that spoke into contemporary culture. We were also creating moving image “visuals” to enhance events and worship experiences. I once overheard a nun who was watching one of our “visuals” films describe what she was seeing up on a video screen “Oh yes, its like a stained glass window, only it moves“!
The “Images for Worship” video series was one of the things that helped OSBD become well known. Over time we made many, many video resources and short documentaries both for ourselves and other organizations and helped many young people to find an outlet for their creativity. The journey took us as far afield as Peru and Ukraine.
After several years I found myself being asked to look at feature film scripts and ideas for larger film projects. Rob Taylor (who was chair of the charity at the time) and myself decided to establish a new company that could be more focused on bigger commercial projects that told bigger stories on bigger screens.
Blue Hippo Media came into being in 2008 and since then we have made 6 feature length films, many of which have won awards and been distributed into cinemas and on TV around the world. As an indie film production company we have had some hard lessons to learn around just how tough it is to compete in that market as well as secure ways to earn a living! It’s a roller coaster ride for sure.
One Small Barking Dog is both the older of the two and, in a way, the newer, in that it took a hiatus, but is now back. Why did you bring ‘The Dog’ back from the dead, and what are your immediate plans?
It has been a long while thinking, exploring and praying about whether “The Dog”, as OSBD became affectionately known, should live or die.
However, over the past 18 months, others and I have felt increasingly that it should be engaged again in creating meaningful media and content that can speak into contemporary culture as it works with and for young people. Media that has the DNA of the kingdom embedded in it but isn’t pushy or trite but has real meaning.
We also believe that the newly revived OSBD can gain wider traction and impact based on the great strides Blue Hippo Media has made.
Our core areas are:
Engage young people through training and development in film-making.
Create innovative media to explore and communicate.
Connect disparate groups and individuals interested in creativity and contemporary culture.
The specific projects we want to develop include;
A feature documentary about what it means to be a young person in 21st century Britain. An ambitious film that we hope will have a really big impact on society.
A series of FREE on line/downloadable visual meditations, that help those within and outside of Church explore and engage with spirituality.
A series of FREE provocative and thought provoking short viral films aimed at on-line sharing. Issues around contemporary and spiritual themes that help us all explore what it means to be connected and engaged with our world.
A pilot scheme to run a film school for young people who want to be filmmakers and make a difference in their world. This will become an on-line virtual school that aims to enable young people both here in the UK but also from countries facing real challenges through war and conflict and natural disaster.
So, how can we get involved?
To do all of this and max out our potential impact we need support.
We are hoping to build a bedrock of monthly givers who believe in what we are doing and can stand with us for the next 12 months. We are also hoping that we will get some one off gifts and find some partners who want to work alongside us on some specific projects.
This support will give us the “oxygen” to develop and create the key areas of work, pay some part time salaries and very small overheads ( we have no office base and very little outgoings that detract from the core work ). The difference it will make will be in enabling media to be made that really does have an impact both in and outside of the Church, helping young people to engage in those processes and learn skills to become filmmakers themselves.
If you can help that would be awesome.
For a third time, then, thanks a lot Pip. If you’d like more information about Blue Hippo Media or One Small Barking Dog, those words aren’t underlined for nothing. To support what Pip is doing and give to the work of OSBD, click here
Following on from last week’s introduction to Pip Piper, today we continue our interview with the Birmingham based film maker, focusing on art, faith and church and how the three can combine.
What lessons have you learnt about living out the duality of being a Christian and being an artist?
The simple answer is, there is no duality.
I am not a Christian filmmaker nor am I a secular one.
I am a filmmaker period. I am also a follower of Jesus and that creates a life defining, distinct and deep DNA in who I am and how that outworks in what I do and say and engage with. Those two dynamics are intertwined and co-existent. There may at times be inner conflict but that is more the reality of the spiritual walk in this world rather than defined by being a creative, it’s just a reality in my opinion!
In many ways I think artists and creatives have been misunderstood at best and largely ignored and even ostracized by the church, particularly the evangelical segment. The focus on the rational and mechanics of faith have over time in certain quarters pushed creativity away from the mainstream Christian experience.
You also see creative people who have faith being “boxed” and defined by having to create within the context of a narrow world view on what is relevant “Christian” art and that is very damaging.
I believe that at His core, God is super creative, dynamic and diverse. Simply look at the world around you. In this created diversity is a multiplex of paradoxes and dynamics at work that can make us struggle, question and even doubt but ultimately if we commit to the quest, it is beautiful and life giving.
Our creativity should be no less.
Your relationship with church has been interesting through the last few years. Can you talk us through the journey you’re on with the local church?
Well, like many I began to question the reality of just what is core to faith and what is a manufactured and a culture based interpretation.
This was borne out of hurt, which I think is often the case and at the time can be very destructive. Yet in many ways I am very grateful for it, how it has shaped me and also looking back aware of my culpability in the reality of just what was happening. As a passionate and dare-to-take-risks youth pastor I was probably a little difficult to manage!
One of the areas I was struggling with was the focus on the church as a “machine” which I often feel it ends up being rather than the upside down world changing kingdom Jesus was ushering in.
The “machine” consumes all around into its shape and making rather than releasing and empowering its “people” to be partakers of the revolution that is Jesus.
I guess in that questioning I ended up on the margins and at times way outside of the mainstream Church. At times it was a very lonely and painful place. To be honest having to fend for myself outside of regular church attendance meant I had to find ways to journey with my faith and in that I found some very positive ways to connect with God and have an honest and open journey with Him.
I certainly went on a journey! And it continues, but in many ways I have come to a place of peace and self-awareness of what matters most in my faith walk. My wife and I currently attend Oasis church in Birmingham. I still struggle, but in Oasis I have found a very honest and transparent space. A church full of people, all aware of their own struggles, and helping one another to find the most positive way forward.
Thanks again Pip. Next time, we’ll find out what Pip is up to at the moment and how we can get involved, but for now, check out the trailer for Blue Hippo Media’s ‘Last Shop Standing’, which Pip directed (and which you can purchase here)
One of my favourite mornings of 2017 so far was spent having brunch with Pip Piper. Pip is a Brum based film maker (with an IMDB profile and everything), and I knew a bit of his story already. However, I’d never properly picked his brains before – and what brains they were to pick! I was hugely impressed by both his wisdom and integrity and as soon as the opportunity to interview him for the blog came up, I was delighted to take it so as to share the wealth a little wider. So without further ado…
Jonny Mellor: Hi Pip, could you introduce yourself to the Sputnik readers?
Pip Piper: I am a film producer, a charity director, a film company co-director, a documentary director and involved in several initiatives including being CEO of the Producers Forum and part time lecturer on an MA in film distribution and marketing that I helped set up. I have been married 27 years and have 3 grown up sons.
Originally, I was a full time youth worker and did that for many years in different guises. From 1997 I began developing the emerging work around OSBD (One Small Barking Dog), a media outfit that had grown out of the youth work and would become a formal charity in 2001. Alongside my wife Debbie and whilst raising our kids we also set up many initiatives to support young people and youth workers across the city and nationally. The first few years we just relied on God providing what we needed which was very exciting but terrifying at times to be honest! But I have often said that over 20+ years of not having a salary we have never missed a mortgage payment or a meal for the kids! God is good. TBH we all rely on the Father’s goodness no matter what our fragile circumstances!
In many ways since really pushing OSBD, making films has been the main passion and focus. So: 20 years+ of making and creating, enabling others, communicating and engaging.
JM: You made the strange journey from church youth worker to internationally acclaimed film director. How did this work out?
PP: Ha ha acclaimed! That’s nice…well yep I’m very appreciative- we have won some awards along the way, that is always great to get some recognition for what most of the time is very hard work by everyone involved.
As mentioned above in many ways it was a very natural journey that simply embraced the direction we felt we should be heading and combined with that cool mix of spiritual yearning, opportunity, passion and evolving support it found its way organically.
I’ve always been very keen to advise people to go for their dreams and accept perceived failure as lessons along the way. I am not afraid of perceived failure and, I guess from my mountain climber/instructor background, I love taking risks!
I have been very fortunate to have support from my wife and kids and also from friends and colleagues. That counts for so much.
JM: If you had to pick 3 highlights of your career so far (and one lowlight) what would they be?
PP: That’s tough!…
Well let’s maybe start with a lowlight and then build up from there.
I guess when you have spent an incredible amount of time, effort, money and goodwill on getting films made, when something really bad happens it really hurts. The Insatiable Moon is a feature film shot in New Zealand which I produced and took 10 years to make with massive sacrifices from many involved. The film was amazing and did really well, winning several awards. When a very well known film outfit brought the film out on DVD for global release, after a good run in cinemas, it was out of sync (lips didn’t match the spoken words) and that destroyed the film’s potential to break out. That was so gutting on so many levels. BUT, I believe the film is still to have its day!
Now for the 3 highlights!
1: Making The Insatiable Moon with an incredible team of people and having the stamina and determination to do so over a 10 year period. It is a film I am very very proud of.
2: Seeing young people I have helped to mentor, train and encourage flourish in the creative and film industry. That’s a huge bonus for me. Some, I have spent decades working with and others, just a few months, but it makes so much of what I do worthwhile.
“True success is in the success of others”, a very wise person once advised me.
3: The whole journey- if that’s not too much of a cliché. But I am amazed that both myself and key others involved in this journey are still going! There have been numerous set backs and tough times alongside amazing seasons too. The combination of God’s good grace, friendship and support, my family’s patience and love and never ending new opportunities for creating/collaboration and meaningful engagement is a truly marvelous thing.
Thanks Pip. We’ll continue the interview next time, but for the time being, this will give you a flavour of The Insatiable Moon…
When I first started sniffing around for artists in our particular network of churches in 2012, it was pretty tricky to find artists in any discipline who were making work that would be viewed as credible outside the church.
When it came to fiction writers, this scarcity was most pronounced. A few children’s authors slowly crept out of the shadows, but for about 3 years I failed to find one published novelist in any of our churches who was writing for an adult audience outside the church. Now, I in no way want to undervalue children’s authors- writing well for kids is at least as hard as writing for adults. However, this imbalance is worth reflecting upon.
A culture is shaped by its stories and its storytellers. If my experience is indicative of the wider Christian scene, our vacancy from this area should be a cause for considerable concern. To put it slightly differently, what does it say about us, as Christians, if we can only write stories that engage with children? Is it true that modern evangelical Christianity cannot engage over 18s who don’t follow Jesus in imaginative conversation?
I’d been perplexing myself with such concerns for some time when, with some relief, I met Mike French last year. Mike was the owner and senior editor of the prestigious literary magazine, The View From Here, and is the author of the novels, The Ascent of Isaac Steward, Blue Friday, Convergence and An Android Awakes (all published by Elsewhen). He is also amazingly a real life follower of Jesus and was part of a Catalyst church!
Being of such a rare breed, I’d recommend any of us who have an interest in making art that engages with a universal audience to consider what Mike has to say very carefully. I’ll be honest with you, some of you guys will struggle with his style and content (we’ll get on to what I mean by this shortly) but it’s a struggle I think it would be well worth undertaking. The choice is reasonably stark in this area: we can either continue to play it safe and remove ourselves completely from the main plot line of our culture’s evolution or we can, like Mike, seek to navigate the treacherous path of honestly and authentically sharing our stories in a way that people will hear.
With all that said and done then, Mike, over to you…
How does writing fit into your life?
I work normally between nine in the morning to about three in the afternoon. Outside those hours I keep busy in home dad mode running the house and looking after my three kids. Although of course secretly my subconscious is at work 24/7 on my latest writing project. It normally wakes me up at 3AM and downloads all the stuff it’s been working on. It’s basically highly annoying.
Since reading Android, I’ve also read ‘Isaac Steward’ and hugely enjoyed them both. They seem similar in structure in that there are quite defined alternate stories going on in both books that actually tie in to a larger narrative. What comes first- the alternate stories or the narrative that pulls them together and how do they work together as you write? Are there particular influences that you draw upon in this specific style of writing?
Normally the larger narrative is the starting place. With An Android Awakes this was definitely the case, although after I started I realised that I had made a lot of work for myself: Each story contained within the overall story is very short and so I frequently had to come up with a whole new concept and story to go with it.
I’m not aware of any influences in this format other than concept albums from bands like Pink Floyd, which have had a big influence on me. The Dark Side of the Moon for example has very distinct musical elements within it but they become more than the sum of their parts by feeding into a larger conceptual landscape.
The thing that makes you different to any other Christian writer I’ve read is the amount of sex in your novels! This is something that most other Christian writers wouldn’t touch with a barge pole, and many Christian readers would find really unsettling. How would you respond to a Christian critic who thought that your novels were too graphic in this regard (or even in terms of violence or swearing)?
Well I wouldn’t call myself a Christian writer, rather a Christian that writes novels. I think there is a difference, certainly to me. When I first started writing I got professional help from a literary consultancy and they liked my style but pointed out that I used very flowery Christian language whenever I covered adult themes. I studied other writers like Julian Barnes and Iain M. Banks and after a lot of soul searching decided that if I wanted to be good at my craft then I should use clear language when describing sex or violence. Always making the right word choice is something I try and do as a writer and if you can’t do that because you are afraid of what people might think of you, then you are probably in the wrong job.
As to going there in the first place…
I think as a writer you are trying to emotionally connect with people and deal with human struggles and challenges and a major part of being a human is your sexual identity and desires. If as a writer that is off limits, then that severely restricts a writer’s ability to cover the whole spectrum of what it is to be a human on this planet.
I also think as Christians we should really be in this arena, rather than being afraid of it. Part of the problem is we often confuse the cultural sensitivities of the society we live in with Christian ethics. Often they have nothing to do with each other. It was culturally acceptable for example for the Minoan woman in Crete thousands of years ago to wear clothes that left their breasts exposed. If we were to time jump them forward to today then people would find that highly offensive. At the time it wasn’t.
Your 4 novels have all been published by Elsewhen. What advice would you give writers looking to be published or looking to self-publish?
Prepare for rejection, pain and heartache. Visualise a wall before you and then run repeatedly into it until you become unconscious.
If you can survive that then good, you are made of the right stuff and the following might be of interest.
Don’t scatter gun all the agents and publishers with your novel. Approach it like a job application. Do some research on who might like your kind of work and then contact two or three of them.
Look for junior agents that have just started their own lists of clients.
Email specific agents and publishers and ask if they would like to see your work. (Make this very short and do not attach your work.) If they don’t advertise their email then take a leaf out of Sherlock’s book and do some detective work. Many editors are always looking for new work even if their company says they do not take unsolicited work.
Make sure you have a decent one page synopsis.
If you are considering self-publishing then do not believe any of the hype you might read. Unless you already have an established fan base the chances of you selling loads of copies is very small.
You are presently working on the sequel to Android. How’s it going and can you give us any teasers?
I’ve finished the first draft and I’m very excited about it! It’s called Fictional Alignment and will be out early next year. I’ve really enjoyed writing it and it deals (amongst a lot of other things) with the importance of stories in shaping and forming our society. In the novel, androids have decided that fiction is evil and they want to eradicate it. What follows from this really pits fiction against fact. They are two very different world views and so I throw them at each other – what happens isn’t pretty!
Thank you Mike. To get hold of any of his work, there is a South American River that can help you. If that doesn’t ring any bells, just click here.
Easter holidays beckoning, todolist sufficiently shrunk, I sat down this morning to finally read Tim Keller’s ‘Every Good Endeavour’. Haven’t even made it to the foreword yet, because of the opening quote…
During the year 1957, I experienced, by the grace of God, a spiritual awakening which was to lead me to a richer, fuller, more productive life. At that time, in gratitude, I humbly asked to be given the means and privilege to make others happy through music. I feel this has been granted through His grace. ALL PRAISE TO GOD.
This album is a humble offering to Him. An attempt to say “THANK YOU GOD” through our work, even as we do in our hearts and with our tongues. May He help and strengthen all men in every good endeavor.
It is from the liner notes to John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme.
It’s always a pleasure to catch up with Dave Blower. Last time we met up, it came with the added bonus of hand ground coffee from a funny little machine he had lying about in his kitchen! Upon drinking said coffee, he agreed to do a short interview about his latest project ‘The Book Of Jonah’ which, I would argue is his most ambitious project yet, and is about to be released on the unsuspecting world on 13th March, through our friends at Minor Artists.
So, here it is. If you’ve not come across Mr Blower before, you may want to pick up the story so far here, here or even here.
With the formalities done then and now that we’re all on the same page…
Jonny Mellor: Before we get on to your new release, could you fill us in on what’s been going on since we last heard from you. ‘Welcome the Stranger’ seemed like a very important release- has it opened any new doors for you or even changed your practice or methodology?
David Benjamin Blower: Welcome the Stranger is a collection of folk protest songs about the refugee crisis. Of course, since last Spring when the record came out, the world has changed and countries like ours have become very unwelcoming. The record is themed around Jesus’ story of the sheep and the goats, and the notion that to reject the suffering stranger is reject Jesus himself. The last year has been hard to watch.
This is the first record where I’ve used songs to tell real people’s stories, of living and dying as refugees. Having played these stories in different places, so many people have come up to me and asked, “What can I do? Where can I send money? Where can I volunteer?” I’ve been struck by the importance of telling people’s stories as an artist. We can do things the news can’t.
JM: Your new release ‘The Book Of Jonah’ follows the path set by ‘Kingdom vs Empire’ and is a book and album (the book is called ‘Sympathy For Jonah’). How did this project come about?
DBB: This happened haphazardly. I started writing a musical of the story of Jonah, mostly out of a fondness for the Bible, Moby Dick, Pinocchio etc. and while I was putting together songs about how terrible things were in Nineveh, I saw on the news footage of ISIS blowing up the tomb of Jonah in modern day Nineveh; that is, Mosul, in northern Iraq. I thought to myself, “I wouldn’t want to go to Nineveh either.” The news about ISIS (back in 2014/15) became so disturbing that I lost all taste for the musical and started, wide-eyed, writing a book about how frightening real enemy love might actually be. Everyone picks on Jonah for his lack of warm feeling towards the enemy, but I don’t see many of his pious critics marching off to Mosul to make peace with the regime there. And any historian will tell that the Ninevites (Neo-Assyrians) were more dreadful than ISIS, by a long way.
The book was published last summer, and then after that, rather more soberly, I finished recording the musical retelling.
JM: I know it has been gestating for a while and I imagine that there has been a weight to living with these ideas for so long before being able to finally unleash them on the world. How do you manage to contain such a strong prophetic vision (alongside the accompanying passion and restlessness) without it eating you up?
DBB: I think it probably does eat me up. I don’t know if you can make good art about something without allowing yourself to swallowed up by it. If you’re not battered by the journey, then where did you go, and what do you have to tell? Perhaps this is why artists have often been considered dangerous by controlling societies. We’re unhinged openings for dangerous and unpredictable kinds of power to enter the orderliness and disrupt it: in this case, grace, forgiveness, re-humanisation of the enemy, redemption of the irredeemably evil, etc. The prophetic job is to bring in this dangerous new thing, not, I suppose, to always come out in one piece.
Living with this story over the last few years has also been interesting, because the contemporary subject matter has changed. When I began, the monster of public discourse was ISIS. Today, many struggle to see people like Trump, Farage and Le Pen as human beings – an attitude which is quietly and dangerously transferred onto all those who support them. I also know people on the right who can only talk with disgust about “liberals” and people on the left. Who wants to go Jonah-ing over to the terrible other now?
JM: At Sputnik, we usually draw quite a thick line between art that is made for Christians and art that is made for a universal audience. You are something of an exception to this rule, as you are one of the few artists that people who aren’t Christians still want to eavesdrop on, even when you’re speaking primarily to Christians. ‘The Book Of Jonah’ would be a project like this as your focus here does seem to be Christians and the church. Can you tell us about about how you see the Christian artist’s responsibilities to speak to the church and to the world and how that works for you?
DBB: You mean that our art is best when it speak to a universal audience, and not into the Christian bubble, I think?
I agree. But of course, stained glass windows, cathedrals, orthodox icons, choral evensong and the KJV were made for Christians, and yet they’re also delighted in by a universal audience, because they have integrity. When we look uneasily on art made for Christians, I think we usually mean the sort of art made by evangelicals for evangelicals in decades past, which we’ve come to distrust as a sort of matrix designed to keep us in the fold. But for me it would be dishonest to make art stripped of Judaeo-Christian aesthetics. This is the well I drink from, and plenty of outsiders want to drink from it too.
I feel I’ve always been trying to make work for a post-secular audience. I could never accept the sacred/secular divide, and I’ve always been trying to bring these two realms together: trying to bring religious discourse back to earth, and trying to reveal how religious the secular world always has been. The prophets have always been my model as an artist, and they simply addressed their people, whether they worshipped this or that, something or nothing.
I find the present moment a very exciting one to work in, because the post-secular mishmash has now become the fact (where it is accepted that religious narratives of all sorts are sloshing everywhere, and nothing is neatly contained or separable). Meanwhile, the old sacred / secular divide is collapsing. We could gone on about what all that might mean for a long time.
JM: The Book Of Jonah then- give us the hard sell. Why should this release be added to our bookshelves and Itunes libraries?
DBB: The Book of Jonah is a radiophonic production of the biblical story, read in it’s entirety from the old King James bible by the deep voice of theologian Professor N. T. Wright, whose wisdom and wit illuminates the narrative. Jonah himself is played by the theologian and activist Professor Alastair McIntosh, in his wheezing Hebridean sea-dog’s tones. The story is punctuated with dark folk ballads and awash in spaghetti western soundscapes.
Sympathy for Jonah is a series of meditations on the biblical tale, delving into the necessity, and the dreadful cost, of enemy-love, for all of us. Especially in these divided times. It’s short. I’m told it’s funny, though I didn’t particularly mean it to be. And it gives theologically digestible exploration of both the Book of Jonah and of the cross of Jesus.
JM: What’s next for you? How are you going to promote this project and have you got anything else in the pipeline?
DBB: I’ll be spending time performing The Book of Jonah where I can; lounges, bars, churches and gatherings, and holding discussions around the themes of the book. There’s always something new in the pipeline, but I’ll focus myself on planting our community garden and gathering some theological learning groups in the coming months.
* * *
Thanks Dave. As always a pleasure. And if you can’t wait until the 13th March, here is an exclusive little preview of a track called ‘Sackcloth and Ashes’to whet your appetite…
Just before Christmas, I got wind of the fact that Mike was lining up a Well Done You project for release this year. Soon after this revelation, I found out that that there were a number of Perendiz tracks ready for release too. The eagle eared amongst you would have noticed the first evidence of this flurry, Part Wolf, that we profiled on the blog last week, and I thought that we should probably catch up with the man himself before the floodgates really opened. So, Sputnikmagazine, it’s my pleasure to introduce Mike Lawetto…
So, Mike, Introduce yourself.
My name is Mike Lawetto, and I sing, play, mix, and produce. And my first project to be released is Well Done You. WDY has been in my head since 2015 – two years of tinkering, thinking and trying to dream it right. It’s not a band, it’s a collaboration – I write and produce and bring in the right people for each song. It’s an exciting process and gives me the freedom to explore whatever the song needs.
Tell us about the single ‘Part Wolf’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwRsWdTbJLI
Part Wolf is one of the oldest tracks from the upcoming album, it is an introduction to how the rest of the record will sound to listeners. The track itself is complete mayhem. It’s relentless, never let’s up, and that’s what I wanted people’s first experience of WDY to be. It’s funny how Part Wolf came about. Initially, musically speaking, I was aiming for more a Weezer vibe (Blue Album, Pinkerton) than what actually was created. It took me awhile to realise that Part Wolf was more me than what I thought I wanted it to be. Once I was confident in the new direction, it was game on and the whole album started to take shape because of it. Also on a tech note, Part Wolf was my first outing with Marshall amps (which I now adore). I explored the track with different guitars rather then sticking with just my Strat so all in all it was a freeing experience as a writer and producer. Also wanna give a special shout out to Kelani for drumming on that track way back in a sweaty hot room in summer 2015.
What does success look like for you in your art?
There are two ways I look at success:
The first one is getting the record done right. Regarding WDY I’ve been demoing seriously since summer 2016 and now have 38 songs under my belt. I’ve nearly got the album done, I’m tracking the last bit of drums in a week which is exciting. With Perendiz it’s getting everything ready as well. I’ve got two singles ready to go, so I’m currently looking at how I will release them. So my first real success is getting everything written, recorded, produced and mixed to the right level across the board. It was very important to me to take my time to learn how to finish a record by myself. For many years I was on other people’s time to get my records done because I didn’t possess the skills and though I am grateful for the time they put into my stuff it was very frustrating waiting. Finishing any form of art is a hard thing to do but it’s something I’ve purposely been working on over the last year.
Secondly, I want people to enjoy the music. It will be a major success hearing that people love what I’m doing.
You have several different musical projects bubbling away at a time and seem to operate under a number of personas (welldoneyou, PERENDIZ, Captain Pinball, etc). How does this work?
As my day job I’m Mike Lawetto, a freelance producer, songwriter and mix engineer. When I’m not doing that, I split my time between Well Done You – my rock side and Perendiz – my pop side. I don’t feel on a Tuesday how I did on a Sunday. Some days I rock, some days I pop. For me, music is at its greatest when it’s screwed around with, messed expectations, a noisy evolution – that’s what makes it beautiful. And that’s how Well Done You and Perendiz came about. Captain Pinball was just a crazy one-off, a track that I wrote with a team for a record label, it was mega-fun, but definitely more of a one-off project. I love pop music, we just unfortunately live in a time where a lot of pop music isn’t about exploring anymore rather regurgitating what’s worked in the past. Perendiz is all about trying to put the exploration back into Pop music and hoping people think it’s good. You’ll never hear Perendiz do the same genre – a few songs from the same ball park, sound wise, but ultimately I’m gonna keep moving. You’ve got to stay fresh, exciting and innovative. Oh and also I get bored quickly.
It’s the same with Well Done You. I’m a rocker at heart, my first true love, yet I’ve just been bored by the majority of rock music for years. I’m lucky if there’s more then two new good rock albums a year now I like. I’ve made a conscious effort to keep my colours wide and open. As a producer I’ll never say no until I’ve tried it a few times. That’s how I approach everything I do musically, which is why this year you will get a wide and genre-less bag of music from Mike Lawetto.
So, what exactly have you got in store for us in 2017?
Perendiz will releases a few singles (potentially an e.p) and a lot of collaborations. I’ll be releasing and producing with other artists such as Jamison, Alix Original, Dan Crook and a few others that are nearly confirmed. Well Done You will be releasing quite a few singles, an EP, album and a Christmas single. It’s gonna be busy year and I’m super excited.
There’s a bunch of critically acclaimed films that have gone under many of our radars. In response I started gathering a few friends on occasions to watch a movie with me and then spend time afterwards arguing whether it merits the praise. Our last film was Ciro Guerra’s ‘Embrace of the Serpent’.
Embrace of the Serpent
Director: Ciro Guerra
Summary: A drama set in early 20th century Amazonian rainforest
Released: 2015
Certificate: 12A
Starring: Nilbio Torres, Antonio Bolívar, Jan Bijvoet, Brionne Davis
Rating system: I consider 3 aspects of the film: the script, the whole production and finally how strongly the film impacted me and provoked powerful ideas and intense conversation. In each category I give marks out of 10.
‘Embrace of the Serpent’ is a stunning, thought-provoking, psychedelic and refreshing piece of South American cinema. Shot in black and white, it tells two stories and interweaves them. In 1909 a German ethnographer seeks the help of an Amazonian shaman named Karamakate and together they embark on a dangerous quest to find a rare healing plant. 30 years later an American botanist approaches this same shaman, now worn out and losing his memory, to be his guide on the search for the plant.
Nilbio Torres and Antonio Bolívar, the 2 actors that play the young and old Karamakate are outstanding. Torres’ beauty, intensity, clarity and wit grabbed me right from the start. This is his story, not the story of some explorer from the northern hemisphere. In fact even the way the two intertwining tales are edited expresses the Amazonian people’s non-linear perception of time.
There’s a nuance to each of the main characters. No one fits neatly into their designated stereotype boxes. Roles are subverted and this film artfully exposes the brutality and spiritual hypocrisies of colonialism.
Every decision Karamakate, who is the last surviving member of his tribe, makes has the added weight of him being the sole representative of his people. Two of the key questions the film asks are: if you forfeit your very essence can it regained? What is lost when God’s creation is systematically destroyed and the people who can read Eden’s maps have been killed?
Martijn Schirp of High Existence writes: ‘Watching this story unfold, a deep longing awakens to return to what we have lost.’
I was struck by the moment Karamakate hears European music for the first time via botanist Evan’s phonograph. The piece is Joseph Haydn’s classical Bible-inspired masterpiece The Creation. Karamakate immediately recognizes within the music something Evan probably doesn’t recognize: a deep, authentic spirituality and an aural portal to something transcendent. ‘Embrace of the Serpent’ vividly depicts both culture clashes and connections. If you’re up for an epic, invigorating, disturbing rainforest adventure then I recommend this film.
I’ll finish with a quote by the film’s Colombian director Ciro Guerra: This knowledge (of the indigenous tribal sages) has been passed on through oral tradition, it’s never been written, and from my personal experience, trying to approach it was kind of humiliating, because it is not something you can aspire to understand in a short time like you do in school or college. It is related to life, generations, natural cycles; it really is a gigantic wall of knowledge that you can only admire and maybe try to scratch its surface.
Your chance to respond:
Have you seen Embrace of the Serpent? What did it make you think about? How did it make you feel?
I can’t work out whether I’m late to the party or should have left this a little longer to marinate, but I’ve got round to writing some reflections on ‘Silence’. Last week, I focused on the work itself; today I wanted to turn my attention to some lessons we can learn from how ‘Silence’ was actually received.
Making faithful, powerful art can still get you rejected
The response falls quite neatly, but still jarringly, into two camps. We’ll come to the general reception later, but when we look at the response of the church, it is fair to say that Endo’s book was not embraced, initially at least, with open arms.
On its release in 1966, Silence, as a book, was condemned by several Catholic churches in Japan and some sectors of the evangelical church across the western world were similarly suspicious. Mark Williams, professor of Japanese studies at Leeds University, notes that despite the fact that the book sold well in Japan, the “hardcore Catholic community view it as heretical and blasphemous… Endo was persona non grata among Japanese Catholics. You can’t find the book in any Christian bookshops…’ (Here‘s the full source)
Having said this, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the lack of knee jerk condemnations of the film adaptation from evangelicalism this time around (although that may have more to do with the fact that we’re much more comfortable with doubters like Scorcese raising difficult questions of faith, than we are with card carrying believers like Endo doing the same).
In a way then, it wouldn’t be pushing it too much to say that Endo shared the fate of Father Rodrigues: considered apostate by the very church he loved, for doing what, he at least, thought was right. However, while there is a romantic poetry in this symmetry, we mustn’t neglect the personal anguish this would have caused. Endo had to endure real rejection for carrying through his artistic vision, and I personally don’t think that this was an indication that he did anything wrong.
I think that we too, as artists in the church, have to embrace this reality. If we make authentic, powerful work, we will experience similar rejection from our Christian brothers and sisters. This may be simply in the form of misunderstanding or in feeling patronized or undervalued, but recent history would suggest that the greater the impact our work has outside of the church, the greater the rejection may well be from other Christians (Lecrae is an interesting example in this regard).
There are clearly lessons here for the church in general, but for us as artists, who I guess would make up the majority of the people reading this blog, we must go into this with our eyes wide open. I don’t think it should lead us to distance ourselves from church, but to realise that if we are looking for affirmation and even validation there, we will be sadly disappointed. I would wholeheartedly encourage all Christians to knit themselves in tightly to a local church , but at the same time, I’d equally encourage Christian artists to make sure you have strong friendships with other Christian artists who will ‘get you’, although they still may challenge you in your practice. (I guess, in a sense, those last two sentences explain Sputnik’s own raison d’etre very neatly)
Art like this can smuggle Jesus into the heart of a culture
But for many people, they may wonder why we should take the risk at all?’ Why shouldn’t Christians play it safe and go on making sanitised, well intentioned art? Why make work that could lead people to wildly different conclusions to the ones we intended- both in the church and outside it?
I’m sure that there will be a future blog post about the parables of Jesus that could be slotted in at this point, but as it is not written yet and as that would be veering from our immediate subject matter, I’ll simply redirect you to the parable of the shrewd manager (Lk 16:1-9) and then add a WWJD?
The story of Silence itself though gives a compelling response to such questions. The fascinating thing about this story is that the events depicted were very real and still have a huge effect today. There are countless examples throughout history of brutal anti-Christian persecution leading to church growth- ancient Rome and modern day China spring to mind. However Japan is an anomaly. In many ways, Japan successfully suppressed Christianity in the 17th century and it never really bounced back.
Today, under 3% of Japan would self identify as Christian. That’s a smaller number of Christians than you’d find in Burkina Faso, and a smaller percentage of Christians than you’d find in Saudi Arabia. However, at the heart of modern day Japan, Endo’s Silence is revered as a crucial cultural artefact.
In 1966, it won the Tanazaki prize, one of Japan’s most sought after literary awards, and it is still held in high regard in his homeland where he would be listed in any compilation of modern Japanese literary greats.
This is a remarkable achievement. Whatever you think of Endo’s work or of Rodrigues’ example or of Scorcese’s adaptation- this work has burrowed Christianity into the heart of a culture that has systematically suppressed the Christian message in the public square. And anyone who wants to study this book is going to have to burrow themselves even deeper into Christian theology as, let’s face it, it’s not like Christianity is a peripheral theme in the book. Everything is here- from the atonement to repentance to grace to forgiveness. And Jesus comes out of it incredibly well.
It was very moving to read Andrew Garfield’s reflections on playing the role of Father Rodrigues in the film. In preparation for the role, he underwent a whole course of Jesuit retreats and exercises and when he was asked what stood out for him in these exercises, his reply was this:
“What was really easy was falling in love with this person, was falling in love with Jesus Christ. That was the most surprising thing.”
I think that anyone approaching Endo’s work with a spiritual openness would be able to navigate their way to the same affection, and that is something remarkable.
For all their failings, perhaps the apostate priests of the 17th century have left behind a legacy. From their stories, marred by human weakness and failing, Jesus has regained a place at the heart of Japanese culture- hidden from view, yes, but still accessible to anyone who wants to take a look. And now, they are speaking through Hollywood too.
Whether that vindicates them stepping on their fumi-es all those years ago, I don’t know, but it is certainly a wonderful and unexpected epilogue. For all Christians who long to see every culture come to fall in love with Jesus, it’s certainly a huge reason to thank God for Shusaku Endo (and for Martin Scorcese). For all Christians who want to make art that speaks into their specific culture, we should be doubly thankful, because here we have someone who has given us a pretty good model of how it should be done.
Perhaps I’m not watching the right films, but I don’t remember ever seeing a film that did to me what Scorcese’s Silence did to me. Without trying to be clever, I can genuinely say that it brought me to silence.
But as anyone who knows me will tell you, I’m not brilliant at keeping my mouth shut, so I thought, with a couple of weeks, a reading of Endo’s original book and a few good conversations with friends under my belt, it was about time I put down some thoughts here, particularly in regards to the impact this work has on us as Christian artists.
Scorcese has at least until recently described himself as a lapsed Catholic (although he may have had a delapse) but there was nothing lapsed about Endo. Though he wrote Silence, for which he is most remembered, while fighting a particularly nasty bout of tuberculosis, partly processing his own experience of the silence of God, he never stepped on the fumi-e himself, at least publicly anyway. While Scorcese’s spiritual journey is fascinating in its own right, I’d like to assess the film and the book together, as products of Endo’s faith filled imagination, and therefore as an example of exceptional art made by a Christian. This is a piece of art to be savoured (for this try, here), but it is also a fascinating picture of how to make exceptional art if you’re a Christian (and also a helpful heads up as to what may happen if you do).
Before I offer 4 lessons I’ve learnt through the book/film then, I’d better give the rather predictable spoiler alert. However, it’s not just that spoilers lurk in the following paragraphs, but that you will be doing yourself a major dissservice if you engage with ramshackle reflections like this one and miss out on the work itself. So, if you’ve not read the book or seen the film, I can think of at least two more constructive things to do than to read any further at this point.
Okay, with that out the way, what can we, as Christian artists, learn from Silence? I’ll start off today and finish my reflections next week.
We must be prepared to raise dangerous questions and guide our audiences through them
In one respect this is very obvious, but the power of Silence is surely in its ambiguity. Was Rodrigues right to tread on the fumi-e? Would Jesus really ever tell anyone to deny him, particularly as it led to many more denials and acts that actually betrayed other believers? Whose example should we value in this story? Whose should we reject? Should we side with the faithful peasant martyrs, although they may just have been sun worshippers who took Mass? What about the stoic, unflinching Garrupe- who submitted to death, but whose dogma seemed to trump his humanity? Or, of course, the proud, but ulitmately compassionate Rodrigues? And where should Kichijiro fit into our affections?
‘Should’ is probably the key word in that last paragraph. Is there a ‘should’ at all in how we should respond? By that I mean- was the creator of the work’s intention to drive us down any of these particular paths or just leave them all open to us and let us take our pick? This is where Scorcese’s adaptation becomes particularly interesting, as I wonder if the film and book have different approaches to how we ‘should’ respond. The film leaves us with the strong hint that Rodrigues’ faith had continued, not just in him but in his family, but the extent of this faith and the meaning of the events that we’d witnessed are left untouched. Endo however leaves us with something much more tangible. Just before the appendix, Endo depicts Rodrigues administering the sacrament to Kichijiro and the final paragraph leaves us in no doubt as to the final spiritual state of his protagonist:
…The priest had administered that sacrament that only the priest can administer. No doubt his fellow priests would condemn his act as sacrilege; but even if he was betraying them, he was not betraying his Lord. He loved him now in a different way from before. Everything that had taken place until now had been necessary to bring him to this love. ‘Even now I am the last priest in the land. But Our Lord was not silent. Even if he had been silent, my life until this day would have spoken of him.’ (p 257, Picador/2007)
For Endo then, Rodrigues is not an apostate at all, but someone who has found a deeper, more mature love of Jesus even through his apparent act(s) of apostasy. There may even be some quite firm theological convictions here about incarnational evangelism vs simple proclamation of the message.
However, with that said, by this point, the work has been done. My head was in such a spin from all the theological puzzles and overturned expectations that I left the book (just as I left the film) trying desperately to tie everything together, and this for me was where the power of Silence really kicked in.
By raising so many difficult questions, and then at best half answering them, I was forced to think through the places where my own zeal and conviction have been overshadowed by arrogance, what part my own desire for praise plays in even my most apparently selfless acts and whether I’d be prepared to be rejected by Christianity for Christ. Needless to say, these are deeply unsettling questions and I could imagine a work leading you to these in a very unhelpful way. However, in this case, it felt safe. It felt safe, because ultimately my journey was not guided by an unanchored seeker like Ferreira (or perhaps like Scorcese, although that may be a little unfair) but my guide was Endo- one who had heard God speak clearly in the silence and had endured tuberculosis and the rejection of the church and still came out trusting Jesus.
I think this gives us an excellent example of how to take people on these sorts of journeys through our work- how we can lead people down the path of difficult, even dangerous questions, while simultaneously acting as a light to guide them through to a firmer faith in the end.
Our lives help to interpret our work
To reiterate then, while Endo skilfully leads his reader away from the rocks of apostasy through his skill as a writer, the work is rooted not just by what we find in the text, but in what we find outside it- in the life of its author.
There would surely have been many people who stumbled into the cinema on a Saturday night in early January, expecting to see Wolf of Wall Street 2, and have left slightly bamboozled, but perhaps also with the opposite impression from the one I’ve laid out above. It would be quite possible to view this film as a condemnation of missionary activity and a declaration of the powerlessness of the Christian message. However, if you did even a little bit of homework, it would be impossible to hold on to this view for very long.
It may seem very simple, but it is important that Endo wrote this. A person of faith. A person who loved Jesus and worked through these questions positively in his own life. For us, as Christian artists, it is also important that our work is made by us, and therefore our lives should be considered as important interpretative tools of our work.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that the content of my work doesn’t matter. Far from it. However, it does mean that if I am following Jesus closely, trusting him in my own life and growing in faith in him, then I am much more able to raise difficult questions constructively in my work than I would be if I was a flaky Jesus-affiliated drifter.
Ultimately, powerful art raises powerful questions. On the other hand, ‘Christian art’ (as it has been perceived) has often laid out powerful answers, but done it in such a prescriptive way that almost all the power has been evaporated. We must buck this trend and make art that raises the kind of questions that real people are asking, and actually that we are asking. Even those we haven’t yet settled on the answers to.
We don’t want to cause anyone to stumble and we definitely don’t want to lead our brothers and sisters into sin, but actually I wonder if Christians have rushed to sanitise their work (and therefore often neuter it) because they’ve forgotten that their faithful lives are already interpreting their work for their audience.
Of course, this does require that as Christian artists, we hold fast to Jesus, but if we do this, I think we should resist the temptation to fill in all the gaps for people out of fear of being misunderstood. Our lives and our art work in tandem. Let’s aim to make both excellent!
In the next post, I’ll give some reflections on what we can learn from the response to this work, both in the church and outside it.
Last year I read John Darnielle’s novel Wolf in White Van. Though his first major literary work, I have been a long-time fan of Darnielle’s band the Mountain Goats, through which his ability to craft short but emotionally nuanced stories has been consistently demonstrated through his role as the songwriter and lyricist.
As such, I approached the book with high expectations and was pleased to find it did not disappoint. The story Darnielle has crafted is one which is psychologically incisive and strangely unnerving. Yet what stayed with me the most was the way in which the novel examines the power of escapism.
Wolf in White Van focuses on the first person experiences of Sean, a young man recovering from a violent incident which left him hospitalised and requiring facial reconstructive surgery. As a way of passing the time and distracting himself from his injuries, Sean develops Trace Italian, a play-by-mail, choose-your-own-adventure game. Players are tasked with surviving a post-apocalyptic desert landscape whilst searching for the titular Trace Italian, a vast fortress which provides refuge from the brutal conditions outside.
Trace Italian provides Sean with an escape from his immediate surroundings and a coping mechanism for the painful and constrained situation he finds himself in, but even despite Darnielle’s love for all things fantastical, he is not afraid to explore the negative side of such escapism through the book. Sean seems to be aware that his creation offers no ultimate solutions other than a temporary distraction from the player’s immediate surroundings. He confides to the reader that reaching the centre of Trace Italian (the eventual purpose of the game) is impossible, leaving the experience one of endless searching, with no hope of a satisfactory conclusion. Furthermore, when one of his players decides to give up half-way through by committing suicide he treats his decision with a respectful admiration, noting that “He had made the right move.”
All of this got me thinking about the purpose and value of escapism. Defined by the Oxford Dictionary as ‘The tendency to seek distraction and relief from unpleasant realities, especially by seeking entertainment or engaging in fantasy’ escapism can come in many forms. Arguably sports, espionage thrillers and romantic comedies can all fulfil this role. However, when I think of the term it’s often Dungeons & Dragons or science fiction that comes to mind, possibly because their fantastical and otherworldly settings provide a more obvious counterpoint to our own. And whilst nerd culture is becoming increasingly commonplace, it’s hard to ignore the old stereotypical view that the champions of these genres have traditionally been stigmatised as people who escape to fantastical realms to gain a degree of power or worth not afforded them in ‘the real world’.
The point of criticism is obvious. Such entertainment amounts to a kind of ‘emotional fast food’, artificially fulfilling our hunger (for power, importance, nobility, adventure) whilst providing nothing of real substance.
However, there is another way to look at it. JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis, for example, espoused a very different kind of escapism. Few would deny the artistic value of The Lord of The Rings and Narnia series, but what elevates them above the cheap and short term fixes many associate with escapism in general, and the genre of fantasy, in particular?
Firstly, I would argue that though the settings are fantastical and otherworldly, The Lord of the Rings and the Narnia series portray real human conflict and emotion within their fictional settings. Although Tolkien has argued that The Lord of The Rings is not an allegory for either of the world wars, the epic battles he portrayed mirror the actual conflicts which occurred during the writing process. Other real-world concerns echoed in the novels include the corrupting influence of power, the dangers of industrialisation and the importance of courage in the face of evil. Relatively speaking, the Narnia series has tended to operate on a smaller scale. However, the conflicts faced by the protagonists have remained engaging, relatable and believable, despite the inherent fiction in their premises. For instance, in discussing The Lion The Witch and The Wardrobe fellow fantasy writer Lev Grossman notes:
“Edmund doesn’t solve any of his grievances or personality disorders by going through the wardrobe. If anything, they’re exacerbated and brought to a crisis by his experiences in Narnia. When you go to Narnia, your worries come with you. Narnia just becomes the place where you work them out and try to resolve them.“ (Source)
However, if the true value of these works is in the re-framing of ‘real’ conflicts and concerns within the context of a fantasy setting, what worth is the setting itself? Is all the talk of elves and dragons just a hook to get people invested? For Lewis, the role of fantasy was much more than this – it allowed for the suspension of disbelief, the entering of ‘another space’, removed from that which is familiar. Following this, Lewis (whose books were plainly but not offensively evangelistic -a rare thing indeed) used the space to communicate to the reader a ‘higher’ truth, one regarding the nature of good and evil and the presence of spiritual forces, without the reader becoming defensive and disengaging due to their own preconceptions on such matters. In discussing the value of using ‘Fairy-Stories’ to communicate spiritual truth, Lewis writes:
“Why did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or about the sufferings of Christ? Why did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to. I thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to. An obligation to feel can freeze feelings. But supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of the stained-glass and Sunday school associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency? Could one not thus steal past those watchful dragons? I thought one could.” (Source)
Arguably most modern readers would lack a sense of obligation to reverence concerning spiritual matters. However, most will have their own (often negative) preconceptions of Christianity, often dismissing its more fantastical elements (e.g. Jesus’ divinity & resurrection) offhand. However, I would argue that in wilfully choosing to enter an otherworldly space such as Narnia, we abandon our vice-grip on the need for complete rationalism and become accepting of events which make sense not according to strict scientific and logical consideration, but rather those which have an aesthetic and emotional cohesion. (FOOTNOTE 1)
Therefore for Lewis, the question is not ‘Is escapism acceptable?’ but ‘Where are you escaping to?’ For Tolkien, the answer to this was ‘to Joy’. In his essay ‘On Fairy-Stories’ he writes:
“The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous “turn” (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale) in its fairy-tale – or otherworld – setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.” (Source)(FOOTNOTE 2)
However, Tolkien also gave thought to where people were escaping from and why they had need to escape at all.
“I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which “Escape” is now so often used: a tone for which the uses of the word outside literary criticism give no warrant at all. In what the misusers are fond of calling Real Life, Escape is evidently as a rule very practical, and may even be heroic. In real life it is difficult to blame it, unless it fails; in criticism it would seem to be the worse the better it succeeds. Evidently we are faced by a misuse of words, and also by a confusion of thought. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it. In using escape in this way the critics have chosen the wrong word, and, what is more, they are confusing, not always by sincere error, the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter.” (Source)
The ‘Prisons’ Tolkien primary discussed were the forces of fascism and communism operating at the time of writing. However, they could just as well apply to our own dominant world-views. Indeed, for Lewis himself, the fantasy writings of George MacDonald caused a ‘baptism of imagination’ which allowed him to ‘break free’ from the prison of his materialist world-view.
In an age in which materialist and post-modern narratives dominate, we need art to divulge truth about the world, ourselves and the nature of good and evil. The need for good to triumph over evil in our fantasy stories is because we have a sense deep down that this is true, yet it is not something that is necessarily self-evident from the world around us. Being honest in the workplace can earn us the ire of our superiors, making self-sacrificing purchasing decisions on ethical grounds can feel like a token gesture and a relative drop in the ocean. Bad things happen to good people and evil prospers. If there is truth to our basic instincts that a coherent and moral structure to the Universe exists, we need it to be validated by the art we engage in. Taken in this context, the ‘escapist’ literature of Tolkien and Lewis (among many others) becomes, in fact, a kind of ‘hyper-realism’ transporting us away from the illusory hallucinations we find ourselves confronted by (‘Humans are just DNA replicating machines’ / ‘truth and morality are socially constructed’) and into a place of emotional and spiritual truth surpassing that of our immediate surroundings. In the words of Lewis, effective escapism will give the reader a desire for “They know not what”:
“It stirs and troubles [the reader] (to their life-long enrichment) with the dim sense of something beyond their reach and, far from dulling or emptying the actual world, gives it a new ‘dimension of depth’. They do not despise real woods because they have read of enchanted woods: the reading makes all real woods a little enchanted. (Source)
FOOTNOTE 1 Though we still like to think of ourselves as logical and scientific, in a ‘post-truth’ world, we are quickly abandoning the notion that people are driven primarily by rational thought and are re-learning the importance of emotion in people’s beliefs and decision-making. If we are to champion Christianity, the arts’ ability to portray this aesthetic and emotional ‘sense-making’ is something which will be undeniably valuable. After all, can anyone truly say that the idea of penal substitution is ‘logical’ more than it is beautiful?
FOOTNOTE 2 Interestingly, this quote echoes Sputnik favourite Flannery O’Connor and her discussion of ‘the moment of grace’ in her writing. However, in the stories of O’Connor, the ‘moment of grace’ operated on a much more individual and personal level than the cosmic event which Tolkien seems to be referencing.
A few years ago, when laying out the vision behind Sputnik to a gathering of creatives, I made the claim that there were no Christian artists producing culture shaping art now (or in the last 30 years). Basically, I think I’d been warming to my theme, and though I stand by my general point that Christians are not proportionately represented operating at the highest levels in the arts, I was, of course wrong.
My friend Joel Wilson graciously rubbed this in by immediately compiling a list of 50 Christian artists who I’d claimed didn’t exist. Jonny Cash, Makoto Fujimura, Alice Cooper, Terence Mallick, PD James, etc, etc.
Well, that was early 2015. I’d like to add another name to the list and as regards cultural influence, I wonder if this one may be a new entry at number 1. He would have been a pretty high entry when Joel first compiled his list but for the fact that nobody would have guessed that the director of The Exorcism of Emily Rose, Hellraiser:Inferno and Sinister may actually have been a Jesus follower! Now, he’s the the helmsman of the latest Marvel blockbuster and I imagine that we haven’t heard the last of Scott Derrickson.
Doctor Strange very much follows Derrickson’s modus operandi up to this point, in that it is the last film you would naturally expect a Christian to touch with a bargepole. Dr Stephen Strange is the invention of comic artist Steven Ditko and he made his first appearance in 1963 to bring a bit of black magic into the Marvel Universe. From the start, he appealed very naturally to a generation experimenting with psychedelic drugs and eastern mysticism and his escapades are punctuated by spells, incantations, vampires, demigods and demonic possession.
In some ways, the movie follows suit, exploring some of the occult elements from the comics but also relying heavily on a multiverse cosmology- an idea that has become popular through Richard Dawkins, largely as a way to explain the existence of our universe without having to resort to a creator. For these reasons, predictably, there has been a backlash from some quarters of Christendom (here and here). As ‘the editorial staff’ at movieguide.org puts it:
Some movies, however, not only distract some people from the Truth, but introduce completely new paths for people to follow that will lead them away from eternal life with Jesus Christ and away from loving their neighbors as themselves. Sadly, Marvel’s DOCTOR STRANGE is one of those movies.
I’ll be honest- I couldn’t disagree more. As I watched the film, I was incredibly impressed at how Derrickson steers the film in such a way that he not only fails to alienate the comic fan base, but actually leads people potentially towards Jesus through the most unpromising of evangelistic source material.
In many ways, it follows in the footsteps of The Exorcism of Emily Rose as an apologetic against materialistic naturalism (the belief that there is no supernatural reality). One of Strange’s early conversations with the Ancient One makes this very clear:
The Ancient One: You’re a man looking at the world through a keyhole. You’ve spent your whole life trying to widen that keyhole. To see more. To know more. And now on hearing that it can be widened, in ways you can’t imagine, you reject the possibility.
Dr. Stephen Strange: No, I reject it because I do not believe in fairy tales about chakras or energy or the power of belief. There is no such thing as spirit! We are made of matter and nothing more. We’re just another tiny, momentary speck in an indifferent universe.
Now, fair enough, The views Doctor Strange is converted to from this point aren’t exactly from the pages of Grudem’s Systematic Theology, but to hone in on details would be to miss the point. It’s another cinematic blue pill/red pill moment and its effect is to cast curious minds upon the possibility that there’s more to life than meets the eye. (About 30 million curious minds so far, judging by the box office takings).
You see, Derrickson understands his audience and knows the battles which need fighting. The church’s sensitivity to the occult in popular media has been based, at least in part, on a presumption that people’s default position was of Christian faith or at least something similar. Therefore, as the above quote states, these biblically prohibited practices would ‘lead them away from eternal life with Jesus’ and should be resisted at all costs. However, that bird has now flown. People have moved further and further away from faith in Jesus in much more fundamental ways than dabbling with the odd ouija board (dangerous as that may be). A secular mindset has become dominant on both sides of the Atlantic, and therefore, like it or not, you are dealing with people who are already miles away from Jesus. If you want to lead people back, adding another splinter into their mind to cause them to question a materialistic view of reality is surely exactly what is needed.
In this way, Derrickson is a brilliant example of how to engage our culture with the Christian worldview. If we are to regain a voice through the arts, we must learn to pick our battles, ignore our hobby horses and hone in on the key obstacles to faith. We must become adept at bringing out truth from our culture’s own stories, while treating those stories themselves with respect. Derrickson can’t even help himself in this regard and ends the movie with a pretty blatant atonement allegory. This guy’s a hero!
As well as thinking through the positive message of the film, it’s also worth noting what was missing. Think for a moment about what a Doctor Strange movie may have looked like in another pair of hands. Deadpool was Marvel for people who want swearing and sex, Doctor Strange was the one those who wanted séances, tarot cards and occult rituals. But in Derrickson’s hands, all of these elements are underplayed and a vague mysticism pervades. There is an indication that some of the key characters have been dabbling in the dark realms but again this is done in such a way that it would be hard to imagine that many people would be enticed to follow suit through the movie (Will Smith’s son being a high profile exception) . Damage limitation may seem like a humble aim for Christian involvement in the arts, but it is of some value.
However, it would be amiss of me to leave it even there. It’s not just that Derrickson survived his first blockbuster directorship while staying true to his convictions. He’s made a very enjoyable movie going experience. Yes, it’s a pretty generic superhero origin story with fairly 2 dimensional characters but it would be fair to say that in the areas of special effects and action choreography, he has truly broken new ground. Throughout the film, the fight scenes bend the rules of space and time in a manner that should have been a total mess, but instead were thoroughly original and exhilarating.
It’s not high art, but it’s high quality art, made by someone with an attention to detail and a respect for their craft that is quite formidable. And it leads a trail of breadcrumbs that could lead to Jesus. And it does it through the story of an occult magician. And multiverses.
Please pray for Scott Derrickson that God would strengthen him and keep him upright and wise in the industry that he is in. And pray that God would raise up more artists like him. Then keep your eyes peeled, as it will be fascinating to see what he’ll do next.
For as long as I can remember I have always been a bit ‘picky’ with art. I do not claim to have great aesthetic tastes (my bedroom resembles a charity shop more than a peaceful sleeping space), but as I grew up I found myself strongly attracted to certain artistic styles and equally repelled by others.
This disposition and lack of exposure to much of the world of art led me to see all ‘Christian art’ as tacky and kitsch. Paintings of baby Jesus and his porcelain Mother didn’t register with my experience. I preferred the grittier sounds offered to me by Limp Bizkit and the visual world of Mark Eckō’s Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure (2006) on PS2.
As I became a Christian aged 15, there was no real convergence between my love for art and my newfound passion for Christ for quite some time. I trawled through my school’s art books for something ‘interesting’ as my GCSE’s drew to an end, and there I found Mathis Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece (1510-16). Looking at his crucifixion I was shook by the rawness of this image, appearing so ancient and yet, contemporary.
The altarpiece originally created for St. Anthony’s Monastery (an hospital specializing in skin treatment) depicts Jesus gaunt and plagued, agonizingly stretched across the bent crossbeam. An interesting historic detail is that the Messiah’s blighted flesh has been painted to register with the patients suffering from the plague. This is our Christ, like you and I, suffering as we do.
Mary is no longer a porcelain doll, but a haggard old lady, almost fainting into the arms of the distressed disciple at the sight of her brutalized son. The world has fallen apart and the terrors of human injustice have won. Our God has been slain and we are witness to the dark reign of blind and pitiless cruelty.
Soaking this up from the glossy pages of history, this picture appeared far more divine to me than Titian’s Noli me tangere (1510-15) that sees a resurrected Christ evading the earth-bound pleas of Mary from Magdala. Grünewald had painted a Christ that I could register with and one that met my expectations and my existential experience.
From this point I began to have a growing interest in German expressionism. The next crucifix I will focus on is Otto Dix’s War Triptych (1929-32). Painted to show the true horrors of war, the work lost Dix his respected position as a professor at Dresden’ Art Academy. Dix’s exhibiting of this Grünewaldian passion was a stark rejection of the absurd heroism that had begun to glamorise trench warfare.
We can see the similarities between the triptychs immediately. In the central piece, John the baptizer’s hand still points to the suffering servant while the remains of his body is impaled on the beams of a shelled building. The Christ-figure is slumped upside down, his dismembered head crowned with barbed wire, a viridescent hand paralyzed in mid-air, and his skin dashed with the contemporary plague of gun spray.
Dix doesn’t show us a world in which we see Christ simply struck with our infirmities but one in which we bombarded the image of God in the likeness of man into nothingness. Certainly, more can be said about the details of the two paintings, and I invite the reader to pick them out and comment on them.
When looking upon Dix’s crucifix for the modern man, I knew that this work meant far more than I could articulate. Though many argue that War Triptych is a godless blasphemy to the image of Christ in a post-Christian world, I cannot but see a deeper truth in Dix’s horror. If the German expressionist is guilty of besmirching the image of Christ, how much more are we guilty of that same charge? It is not a blasphemy to dare to paint Christ in this desolate world, but a blasphemy that we have created this desolate world, and by extension, painted Christ into it.
Otto Dix’s triptych comforted my tormented mind in the same ways Fra Angelico’s resolute The Mocking of Christ (1441-3) may have done to many a contemplative saint. But in my home where our hymns were more Nothing Else Matters (Metallica, 1991)than Nothing but the Blood of Jesus (Robert Lowry, 1876) these two German crucifixes spoke to me about a Christ who had truly descended into my world.
It registered. It is, of course, not the complete picture but it was a picture that I could start from. Which artists, movements, or media first caught your attention and imagination? Do you still revisit these works, or have they lost their magic?
So, if you caught the first part of our interview, you’ll know that Josh (aka jowybean) has a pretty standard story. Brought to faith through Veggie Tales, brought back to Jesus through My Little Pony. You know, the usual!
As well as catching up on his artistic and spiritual journey though, he shared with me something of the substance to his work, the themes he likes to explore and also how he handles the different challenges that his particular art form throws up for him as a Christian.
Two major themes in Josh’s work are juxtaposition and a love for place and one’s local environment. One of Josh’s favourite pass times is watching youtube videos taken by people driving around major cities in the world. It’s like he drinks in the different environments, architecture and people, then filters them through his world-creating imagination to create new and hybrid cityscapes. Perhaps one will be an image of London and Tokyo combined. Perhaps New York and Amsterdam. Perhaps it will be an African and European city merged together or even a Middle Eastern city, imagined 50 years in the future.
This juxtaposition can be seen very clearly in almost all of us his work as well, as he combines very diverse styles of illustration in single pieces. One of his most recent projects is Humanization.com, a series of comics in an imagined world where humans are all dead, but the internet has become alive. The main character, Cadra, is drawn with a sense of realism, whereas other characters are more influenced by Japanese manga styles, and others will have the wide eyes and podgy noses of Warner Bros characters. And the impressive thing is that these different styles all combine to create a coherent world.
As he puts it:
One of the themes I do in my art is juxtaposition and that doesn’t always mean juxtaposition of subject matter. I’ve tried doing political things but… it was something I never really got a connection with. But if I started doing whimsical things with dragons and ogres next to butterflies- just cute things next to ugly things, that’s the best way I can try to describe it- I got more of a kick out of that… I enjoyed that more..
Now, he’d see the purpose of his art first and foremost as a challenge to people’s creative horizons rather than an attempt to change people’s worldview:
Although I’m not like a deep conceptual artist… I prefer to talk about the world both in the good and the bad, but mostly in a positive light, not always to challenge people in the world but maybe to challenge them creatively. To say to young generations, you don’t need to draw Spiderman characters, or Batman looking heroes or draw Japanese girls in the same uniform to be successful- you can, but it’s better if you try to do something different with it.
But, even with this said, he definitely has the power to communicate clearly through his work. Since starting coming to our church two years ago, he would regularly respond to the Sunday morning sermons by drawing (each piece is started and completed in the duration of the sermon). We then stick these up on the church blog, mainly to encourage creativity in the church and to remind people of the sermon’s message, but increasingly, his pieces contain spiritual insights that add helpful and personal layers to what was said. At our midweek groups, he draws people’s prayers. You know when someone says to you ‘I’ve got a picture for you.’ That kind of thing, only Josh really has a picture for you!
If you have even a passing interest in animation and illustration, you’ll be aware that this genre moves away from cute pictures for children reasonably quickly. In fact, maybe as a reaction against the traditional view of comics and cartoons, there is a deliberate corruption and sexualisation of cuteness everywhere. I personally would find it very difficult to delve deeply into this culture, knowing the temptations that are real to me. However, this is the world that Josh has grown up in, and while he recognises that he has to tread carefully, there is something of an immunity he seems to have developed to some of the culture’s more twisted manifestations.
His work reflects this and if you flick through the second issue of Humanization.com you see this quite quickly. You’ve got prostitutes. Serial killers. A whole scene depicting one character’s prodigal son like descent into depravity. We’ve talked at length about these sort of depictions and I asked him how he would justify such images to a Christian who felt them unwholesome. His point is quite simply that this is the world we live in and to engage with people in this world, we cannot avoid such subject matter:
We live in an age where this is the majority of society’s attitude to material processions and the notion of love, with the wealth of information we have produced in the last decade a lot has come from very weird/dark places that have gone beyond anything you could have discovered from a play boy magazine or risky news report in the news paper. This particular page you mentioned (the aforementioned montage depicting a character’s moral slide) is just a window to highlight these issues, not glorify them or encourage practising them. I think this quote from the page will help sum up my point “But I mistook taking as living, and lived as fully as I could, takin’ what I wanted, when I wanted, however I wanted”
Whatever your feeling about that particular image (you’ll have to buy the comic for that) I think that Josh is absolutely on to something. Christian artists must become better at depicting the ugliness of the fallen world or we will fail to connect with the people who live squarely in that reality. If we simply present a hope to come, without a realisation of the grime that’s here, it will seem to many like wishful thinking disconnected with reality. This is clearly very murky territory, but I think that it’s murky territory some of us have to explore. I think Josh is a great example of someone working right on ‘the line’, and honestly working through how he imbues his art with his faith and deepens his faith through his art and uses his talent to communicate powerfully to those around him.
It is also worth noting that the world of geekdom and comics is not exactly overspilling with Christians. I asked him about this and he recognised that there weren’t many other Christians around but that people responded to the fact that he’s a Christian positively and with curiosity.
In his work itself, he’s certainly moved past the preachy images of his childhood. (‘…It would be weird to plug every picture (at a My Little Pony Convention) by telling people that Jesus loves them.’) For Josh, the best way he can be a witness in his world and work is to be ‘nice to people, do the best I can and stay very positive.’ He expresses his aim succinctly and simply, but as usual gets it totally on the button in my opinion- he wants people who meet him to go away saying:
‘That Jowybean guy, there’s something about him that was different.’
He’s come a long way since Veggie Tales and I’m very excited to see where he’s going to go next. He’s already working on the third issue of Humanization.com and is also looking to continue working as a freelancer in everything from children’s picture books to comics to animations to continuing vending at geek conventions. The project he is most excited about though is working with local historians to document the story behind towns and villages around Birmingham and further afield (building on his Bearwood Art and History Project). He sums this up like this:
I believe that this ambitious endeavour of mine would be a way of giving a spotlight, not to just me as a creative, but mostly to the unsung heroes that God has made… God has blessed me with a wacky but beautiful imagination and I know he wants me to share that with as many people… both in faith or not.
I couldn’t agree more.
To see more of Josh’s work, check this link. To buy Humanization.com, go here.
We all need people like that. People who inspire us, encourage and provoke us. People who you come away from feeling fresher than you felt before you met up. I have the pleasure of meeting up with Josh Whitehouse every couple of weeks and he is certainly such a person.
If you’ve been involved in Sputnik for any length of time, you’ll probably have met Josh. For Josh, illustration is less a skill, more a superpower. I’ve met many artists who can do things I know I’ll never be able to do, but with Josh, often I don’t even know how he is able to do the things he does. His mastery of his craft is breathtaking, but more than that, he thinks in a way that I particularly appreciate and it means that Friday morning catch ups are always highlights in my week.
On one such morning recently, in the middle of a typically involved and fascinating conversation about Japanese animation, I thought that I should really stop being so selfish and share some of Josh’s insights a bit wider. It was never going to be a particularly linear interview, but via a few Facebook messages, a chat recorded on my phone and some other conversations over coffee, I think I’ve got enough to give you a bit of a window into the world of Jowybean. Next time, we’ll go into some of the themes in his work and how he wrestles with the challenges he faces as a Christian illustrator, today I’ll let him guide you through his rather unique artistic and spiritual journey…
It all started with singing vegetables…
Josh, like so many of us, was brought up with Christianity all around him. However, that is probably one of the sole points of common ground most of us will have with his spiritual journey. Growing up, his faith was seen through a very specific lens: Veggie Tales! Such was the influence of Larry and his talking vegetable chums that, as a child, Josh found church quite dull (I mean, singing cucumbers are quite a hard act to follow) and started life with a strong feeling that there was something intrinsically sacred about vegetables!
The basic foundations were set right there- Christianity and cartoons. Working through how to combine the two in any non-vegetable related way was tricky though. Josh was prodigiously good with a pen from childhood. At 9, he got his first exhibition for Disability Art in London (Josh was diagnosed with autism at an early age) and was the official artist at the opening of Millennium Point, Birmingham, when he was asked to produce an original piece of art for The Queen.
Regarding content, he initially drew what he refers to as ‘propaganda, sort of preachy pictures’– devils getting beat up by angels, that sort of thing. However, even then, his artistic vision didn’t quite fit in with expectations. Sometimes the content would be deemed a bit scary by folk at church, but more generally his drawing was just seen as a bit of a distraction. ‘Why was Josh sitting drawing and not listening to the preacher?’ That was how he felt people responded to him in church. They didn’t get what he was doing and more than that felt that his art was somehow unhealthy, and partly because of this, he stopped going to church as a teenager. (Josh was keen for me to point out that another contributing factor to his church absence was a burgeoning obsession with Sonic the Hedgehog which was taking up a lot of his time!)
And perhaps there were unhealthy elements to his work. Josh is the first to admit his own weaknesses and his work (and the imagination behind it) has been a blessing and a curse:
‘For much of my life I felt I was a cartoon character trapped in a human body, I felt I wasn’t real- a Roger Rabbit type character…’
When I first met him, I remember talking at length about how he feared that he lived too much in the imaginative worlds he created and not enough in the real world. I understand his concern, but to be honest, having heard about some of the worlds he’s created, I’d probably quite like to live in them too! It’s always reminded me a bit of JRR Tolkien, who not only constructed the entire history of Middle Earth while writing Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, but created the elvish language too.
Brought back to faith by My Little Pony?!
Whereas Veggie Tales provided Josh’s Christian foundations, his route back to Jesus was through another animated series, and this is a little more surreal. Josh was brought back to faith through My Little Pony.
When I first met Josh, I discovered almost immediately that he was a Brony. Bronies, for the uninitiated are adult male fans of My Little Pony, and I do use the term in the plural, as Josh is far from the only one. When My Little Pony relaunched in 2010, its TV show ‘Friendship is Magic’ was primarily aimed at young girls, but it unexpectedly gained an eager audience among young and middle aged men (as well as women). Maybe it’s a cosplay sort of thing, maybe it’s just a strange offshoot of geekdom, but whatever it is, it’s a thing, and it seems to be the thing that God used to bring Josh Whitehouse back to faith in Jesus.
The world it was based in, the way it was told, and just the visuals- it just had this essence of heaven in there, and at some point I suddenly started hearing God again, coming through there, through the interaction between the characters, the storylines and even the catchy songs, to the point that even some of my pony pieces actually have names of Christian songs in there… And again I do feel strange even now as a Christian talking about this and saying that ponies was a way of sort of getting back into talking with Jesus but in a way that was where the faith grew.
As well as kickstarting his faith, MLP provided Josh with his widest platform as an artist. He is a renowned MLP fan artist and regularly displays and sells work at conventions across the world. But to label Josh, or jowybean to use his artist moniker, simply a Pony artist, would be a huge discredit to him, whatever you think of Hasbro’s colourful horses. Next time, I’ll divulge a little more why that might be.
In the mean time, check out his work. Perhaps his instagram is a good place to start.
I’m really looking forward to meeting Daniel Blake at our Catalyst4theworkplace day. Daniel is a fashion designer with a couple of fashion labels under his belt as well as some pretty tasty freelance credits and a teaching role at the London college of fashion. In short, he’s the real deal! We’re delighted that he’s agreed to come and share his expertise and make himself available to help you guys who are working in the arts on 8th October.
But why wait til then?
This video is a great introduction and encouragement on its own. The whole thing is worth watching but Daniel’s bit about working in the fashion industry as a Christian is particularly helpful for any of you guys working professionally in the arts who really want to shine brightly for Jesus in your work. It’s only a minute as well.
Whenever I return home to Birmingham after a few months away, I am always impressed by the amount of quality art displayed across the city.
Before I focus in on one specific work in the IKON gallery, I would like to recommend Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery’s Turning To See exhibition curated by artist John Stezaker. This exhibit provides an exploration into the work of the curator through art history (from Van Dyck to Lucian Freud); it is certainly worth a look, especially if your art practice/interests involves themes of portraiture and metamorphosis.
Kan Xuan (b. 1972, China) is currently exhibiting a journey of her video works in Birmingham’s IKON gallery (6th July – 11th September). As is often the case with video art, this exhibition provides an immersive experience, examining and evaluating the every day through the inspective lens of the camera (if we are patient enough to sit, watch, and listen).
Xuan’s work takes to common objects and landscapes trying to, in the artist’s words, “find a way to express an encounter with and perception of a kind of “happening” inside of everyday life”. IKON’s website description assesses the exhibit as “profoundly philosophical about the nature of human life”.
The work I would like to briefly examine is a four channel video installation titled Island (2006-2009). The screens flash up with an image of an object that either costs a pound, a euro, a dollar, or two yuan (each currency given its own video). The cheap objects flash up with the computer-generated vocalization of the currency. The slides are separated by a brief moment of darkness. The rapidity of the succession of images creates a sense of anticipation to see the next object revealed. From hex keys to sweets, Island highlights the novelty of the string of cheap devices marketed to us. The looped videos never actually end, that is not until the gallery closes and the operating system is switched off. There is no pause from the barrage of ‘deals’, the same lifeless audio is rhythmically repeated into meaninglessness.
Consistent with Xuan’s oeuvre, two of her great themes are found in this work: globalization and commercialization. The seeming cultural gulfs between the continents and imperial powers are reduced to absurdity: the same objects, the same opiates, the same ceaseless series of tinny nick-nacks fighting for attention and financial devotion. Pound… pound… pound… Yuan… Yuan… Yuan…
Kan Xuan’s works confront the inanity and insanity of living as a meaning-making individual in a wholly disinterested metropolis and under totalitarian rule. It is a rousing call to march against the numbing effects of a consumer society. As the chasm between the rich and the poor widens, how is one to be reconciled to a severely alienating world of commodities?
The lack of the human figure or form in this video work stresses the cold and mechanical processes behind the manufacture of the ‘one size fits all’ pound-shop articles. In comparison with Xuan’s other works in this exhibition, the video’s processes are altogether quite unnatural, as are the goods depicted. Island narrates the feelings of discord and detach one can come to feel in the city: an ever-present reality in our world of self-checkouts and fingerprint access gyms.
In recent years superhero movies have enjoyed an explosion in popularity. Almost every new release seems to be a major movie-going event, thanks to their colourful accessibility and widespread appeal.
Not one to be left out, the church has also taken the genre to its bosom, with youth outings or small group socials often planned around the latest offering. This is perhaps because of their high-budget, action-packed thrills, combined with a low statistical probability of encountering any naked bums (most depicted skin-on-skin contact will be a big manly fist connecting with a big manly face). Or perhaps it’s because the movies normally promise glossy blockbuster entertainment with a relatively straightforward good-verses-evil message; this message undoubtedly a wholesome influence on the church’s young men – teaching them to never give up in the fight against evil with the continual use of physical violence and an absolute faith in their own moral compass. Young women are also assuredly provided with a positive role model in the form of the obligatory female who Can Kick Just As Much Ass As The Boys (albeit one with a third of the dialogue and a mandatory skin-tight costume). So we sit munching a £6.99 bag of popcorn, soaking up the bloodless violence and eagerly await the upcoming DesiringGod.com article about how the aforementioned manly fist represents Jesus and the aforementioned manly face represents satan (or perhaps, in the more subtle efforts, Western Consumerism).
The latest superhero movie, due to grace our screens on the 5th August 2016, has taken a slightly different approach. From the DC stable (trailing pitifully in the wake of the Marvel juggernaut) comes Suicide Squad – a movie adaptation of a comic series where a number of supervillains team up to do a thing. Judging by its title and promotion material, Suicide Squad has spurned the family blockbuster market and plumped for a ‘dark’ tone, mixed with wanton destruction and insufferable zAnY hUmOuR. For example, the initial trailer is largely set in a grimy cityscape and features a string of explosions interspersed by smug quips from the rounded-up roster of rapscallions.
Now I’m a surly sourpuss who doesn’t find the prospect of Suicide Squad particularly exciting or amusing. However, beyond the movie’s jarring technicolour kookiness there’s something else about its overall branding which perturbs me. Specifically I’m referring to the way that it seems to be using the ‘exoticism’ of mental illness in its promotion. [FOOTNOTE 1]
The most obvious target would be the movie’s title. However, I don’t see this as particularly offensive, given the reference to the concept of a ‘suicide mission’. It would also be remiss of me to pretend that I haven’t previously enjoyed the mythos of characters like the Joker. After all, who can truly resist the anarchic allure of an unhinged malefactor, whose loose grip on reality nonetheless fails to prevent him preparing several elaborate, city-wide traps (whose mechanics encompass a series of tricky moral quandaries)? However, whereas previous DC media seemed to encapsulate the Joker’s disposition by a kind of non-descript ‘madness’, things seem a little different this time.
Perhaps I was previously ignorant, but the employment of mental instability as a marketing tool feels more pointed around the release of Suicide Squad – particularly in reference to specific mental health experiences and terminology. For example, in promoting the upcoming movie, a number of entertainment blogs and websites seem to be confusing the terms ‘psychotic’ and ‘psychopathic’. Despite them both containing the same root word, this is not a mistake that should be made lightly.
Broadly speaking, ‘psychopathy’ is characterised by callousness, remorselessness and a lack of empathy. In comparison, ‘psychosis’ refers to a spectrum of psychological and sensory experiences which may involve, for example, unusual sensory experiences (e.g. hearing voices), or holding strong beliefs that others find odd (e.g. ideas that may be considered suspicious or paranoid).
What’s key about this distinction is the kind of behaviours assumed by each term. While high levels of psychopathic traits are associated with an increased risk of violent and antisocial behaviour, people with psychosis are much more likely to be at risk of violence themselves than perpetrators. This may be partly due to negative portrayals of mental illness in the media, including insinuations that psychosis leads to violence. And while there are tragic occasions where people with psychosis commit violent acts, these are rare, overrepresented by the media and often perpetrated by individuals who are responding in fear against a perceived threat to themselves. Furthermore, people with psychosis can internalise negative media portrayals of themselves as dangerous and immoral, which can result in more mental health difficulties and a fear of seeking support from others.
Granted, much of my beef is with various entertainment websites covering the film and not the film itself. However, it’s difficult to shake the feeling that Suicide Squad is trying to court a certain type of promotional material. For example, there’s the article boasting of the need of a therapist on set. Then there’s the interview with Jai Courtney (Captain Boomerang in the movie) where he refers to director David Ayer’s creative approach as ‘psychotic’. Perhaps a misjudged comment, but various websites lapped it up, running the term ‘psychotic’ within their main headline. One site reblogged the story by describing Ayer as ‘psychotic, but in a good way’, noting this was ‘rather fitting for a film about a group of dangerous criminal weirdos’.
Pre-release, the jury’s still out regarding the film itself. However, there is one moment in the trailer which doesn’t bode well. The clip features Harley Quin – former psychiatrist-turned-badwoman who Can Kick Just As Much Ass As The Boys (albeit one with seemingly too much of the dialogue and is featured in one scene stripping down to her bra and pants.) About a minute into the trailer, Harley makes a quip about voices in her head telling her to kill everybody. It’s a joke sure, but the tone in which it’s made is flippant and insensitive. Plus the fact that this was chosen as a crowd-pleasing, ‘sizzle reel’ moment is a sad indictment that people who hear voices presumably aren’t considered important enough to avoid offending, even from a purely commercial perspective.
I don’t believe that Suicide Squad holds deliberately malicious intentions. And it may seem churlish to attack a film on the strength of its trailer and a few misjudged quotes. However, there is something about the marketing of Suicide Squad which seems to be cashing in on the misplaced mystique around mental illness and in doing so co-opts a larger narrative, one which lumps psychosis with violence and moral bankruptcy. This is not a new problem, but it’s one which gives us a false understanding of psychosis and risks stigmatising those who may already be experiencing significant distress and difficulty. In other words, if mental illness is explained as justification for immorality (fictional or otherwise), we may begin to equate the two [FOOTNOTE 2]
Still, who’s excited for Aquaman (2018)!?!
Footnotes
1) Note that some people who experience psychotic experiences would reject the term ‘mental ill’, finding it unnecessarily victimising. There are also debates around the utility of terms such as ‘ill’ and ‘well’, given the continuum of experiences which could be classified as ‘psychotic’ and difficulty in establishing demarcation criteria for a valid and reliable medical diagnosis. In reference to this I have largely tried to avoid using traditional diagnostic terms, however, this discussion is beyond the scope of the current article. For further information, see here.
2) The waters get muddier when you consider that most people who commit violent atrocities and mass murders are presumably not completely mentally ‘healthy’. However, it could be argued that in high profile cases, the label of mental illness is often used post-hoc as a justification for amoral acts, excusing the perpetrators of responsibility and further stigmatising those with established mental health difficulties. It’s a complicated area, which I don’t have space to fully explore in the current article, however, see here for further discussion.
One of the most instructive moments for me at this year’s Catalyst Festival was when, during our live music afternoon, we segued from Prestwood based folk band, The Wick Trimmers, to Birmingham rapper, Mantis.
In many ways the two sets couldn’t have been more different: from Tin Whistle refrains to grubby Wu Tang beats, from jaunty acoustic guitar to a direct and confrontational verbal assault. But if you listened carefully, it was hard to miss the fact that the two acts, while sonically poles apart, were almost identical in their goals and intention. They were both artists drawing on deep musical traditions to engage with their local audience- one speaking into a rural village setting, the other into the inner cities.
As a city dweller for two decades, I often allow my environment to dictate my view of what art is engaging and relevant, but as I watched ‘The Wick Trimmers’ perform, I realised again that to do so is a serious mistake. To that end then, I decided to catch up with The Wick Trimmers’ Colin to pick his brains about what he’s up to in Prestwood and learn from how he, and his church, connects with his community through the arts.
Hi Colin, can you introduce yourself…
I live in Prestwood, Bucks and planted a church 20 years ago after a fascinating three years at London Bible College. Before that I spent many years as a clinical chemist running a pathology lab in the NHS, whilst helping to lead a Baptist church. In terms of artistic influences I suppose my little old violin teacher at age 6 – Miss Dowding, and an history teacher who submitted my first (atrocious) song to some competition, and a protein specialist from The Westminster Hospital who taught science as an art. Oh and Mendelssohn, and The Barley Mow folk club on Burton, and The Beatles.
I really enjoyed your performance at the Catalyst Festival- you and Philippa did a great job. I know that you both normally play with a larger band, The Wick Trimmers- could you tell us about the band and how they came about?
We are now a six piece folk band. Gerard plays accordions, banjo, mandolin, harmonica, his wife Pauline plays the bodhran, Ken on fiddle, Philippa plays flute, whistle and fife, I play guitar and mandolin and John plays bass. The band originates from the Lighthouse Christian Children’s holiday club which began in 1988 and we played as a Barn Dance band for many years. When the King’s Church Prestwood was planted the majority of the band were part of the plant and were the basis for the worship team for the church. That was 1996, and my ministry in worship, song writing and role in outreach led to the band growing in the local area and developing a good reputation for dances and entertainment. As a church we developed song writing in worship, in other musical genres and developed younger musicians too. It was probably after playing as a support for Wendy Craig on one occasion that we began to develop a concert repertoire, writing songs and dance music in the folk tradition.
How have you continued to use your musical skills to serve your local community?
Well, again, it’s not monochromatic, there was the creative process, of writing, arranging, rehearsing, learning as well as the invitations to go and enable communities to celebrate in music and dance. Realising that dancing together is a counter-cultural statement – yet with profound theological and spiritual meaning is quite a revelation to many folk – God’s intrinsic being dances together in a multicoloured dynamic of rhythm, melody and perfect harmony. Then, we realized that whilst we were helping build community and church in other places – we were not finding it easy to make relationships and start conversations within the community where God had placed us. So we set up a monthly folk club in our own village in 2011, with The Wick Trimmers as the resident band. We have a faithful following of around 80-100 meeting either in the local pub, or the local micro-brewery, and encourage other local musicians too and play and sing about places and happenings in our locality. One great thing is that around 10-15 of my neighbours come along regularly.
In what other ways does your church seek to serve Prestwood through the arts?
In terms of the arts we found that some of us were playing regularly in elderly care homes and for residents with acute dementia – playing songs, hymns and storytelling God’s word. We developed a community choir with village people singing worship and positive songs, now the choir includes members from 5 local churches and others with no church connections. One particular work, a song cycle, written here is a celebration of what scripture says about heaven – the choir will be performing the premiere of this, called ‘A day is coming’ in one of the local Anglican churches in October.
Another part of our serving the community is to transform culture – to change the direction of people’s thinking. Anyone who’s read the Bible knows that isn’t a quick fix, and when we were challenged by God that people in the area didn’t know what was going on around them we got involved in the setting up of a social enterprise newspaper, The Source. We only print good news (gospel!) about people. Art, education, clubs, charities, etc. 5 editions a year, 6000 copies free to every home – and we set the values, do the editing, get local people to write, proof read, photograph, and celebrate the good stuff that’s around. We have a team of around 100 – probably half with no church connections and the people of the area love the paper and read it cover to cover.
Audience and context are vitally important in art, and you are clearly making art specifically into a smaller rural environment. What do you think are the specific challenges and opportunities that Christian artists face in a village that may be different from those encountered in a town or city?
The population of villages is much more static and stable than in urban or city settings, and there is a huge gap in the age profile. Young people cannot afford to continue to live in the rural setting once they leave home. This has a massive effect on the amount of energy that is available to the arts. This has the tendency to make art drift into entertainment, pleasing aesthetics and hobby rather than developing challenge, cutting edge and beauty in depth. What’s more, the stability of the population tends towards a suspicion of the new, a rejection of anything unless it’s exceptional and a tendency to intellectualise art – not helpful. Add to this the lack of resources for art, the lack of stimulating iron sharpens iron communitas (see Alan Hirsch) and the lack of venues that are appropriate or big enough…. ‘nough said.
There are very few Christian artists in Catalyst churches at the heart of their local arts scenes, but you guys seem to be among them. What advice would you give other Christian artists seeking to serve their communities in villages, towns or cities?
First of all keep talking to all the people in the church, and particularly the leaders… keep talking… ask questions… encourage them… meet with them, eat with them. They may not understand you, but you and your art can be immensely valuable in building the Kingdom of God. You may not understand the church and its worship and its ways, but by being gracious and keeping on offering your creativity in worship, a generation of love and grace will emerge. Second, stay close to God and filled with the Spirit, listen to the prophets for inspiration (not instruction) – and look around for the ‘man of peace’… ok what do I mean – there are people who create structures that bless people, individuals who simply gather others and promote harmony in a community. Get alongside them as friends, and look for the least likely audience – God loves to surprise even us!
Benjamin Blower has been a Sputnik favourite since before Sputnik even existed (technically impossible I know, but I think you understand the sentiment). I have not come across many Christian artists who have thought through their practice so carefully so as to match their medium to their purpose, and I find Mr Blower to be a very helpful challenge and provocation to me both as an artist and also as a follower of Jesus. He also makes some great tunes, which is always handy as well!
Therefore, it was with some delight that I heard last week that he was dropping a new album totally out of the blue. Welcome the Stranger was released yesterday and you can pay what you want for it (through the Minor Artists shop or just through his band camp). I messaged him last week to see if he could give us a bit of a lowdown and he kindly obliged…
Let’s start with a quick introduction…
My name is David Benjamin Blower and I’m a musician and a writer from Brum.
I’ve put out a number of records, between rap and junk-folk, always very apocalyptic, sometimes with a loose knit protest collective called The Army of the Broken Hearted.
I’m very inspired by the biblical prophets, who didn’t politely pop their music up on soundcloud and carry on. They jarringly interrupted public space and public life with their often shocking work. So the Army of the Broken Hearted was pulled together to bring radical faith art into public space, and to integrate our work more and more with movements of protest and redemptive change.
My first book Kingdom vs Empire came out 2013: a sort of modern apocalypse of British life.
It’s been almost 3 years since ‘Kingdom vs Empire’ though. What have you been working on in that time?
I recorded almost nothing the whole time, oddly. I’ve had a daughter, renovated a house and begun making pallet crate furniture. I’ve written a second book which should come out late summertime. And I’ve written a lounge-folk musical about Jonah and the Whale. Hoping to do a living room tour with that later on this year.
The new album focuses on the refugee crisis. What is it about this particular situation that led you to build this project around it?
I was talking with a friend a few months back, who’d been spending time in the refugee camp at Calais. She was describing and showing photos of the scenes from February 29th this year, when French riot police tear-gassed the camp to get people out of the way, before bulldozers came and destroyed half of it. They made thousands homeless, including women and children, hundreds of whom have now disappeared to goodness knows where. After this, a number of Iranians – mostly Christians – sewed each others’ mouths shut and went on hunger strike, demanding humane treatment for everyone in the camp.
No doubt I began, like everybody, with a feeling for peoples’ suffering, but this crisis is also something more. It’s revealing something about us. Who are we, if we tolerate this? Who are we, if we just “keep calm and carry on” now?
Many people I know, who’ve been spending time volunteering in the refugee camp at Calais, have the air of pilgrims. They go to help, of course, but they also go to recover their humanity, love, truth, the image of God. They come back more sorrowful and more human than when they went.
On the other hand, I know others who want the refugees gone. We’re used to seeing refugee camps on television, in far away lands, but there’s a rising panic at seeing the world’s “problems” making their way across Europe, all the way to our borders… panic that we can no longer keep re-arranging the world “out there” in order to maintain ourselves “in here.” Everything’s changing.
So I think we find ourselves at a fork in the road, and an identity crisis. Who will we be in this emerging future?
The first half of the record simply tells people’s stories – true stories – of people in Iraq, crossing the Mediterranean, slumming in Calais.
The second half of the record is theological, partly because I think the voice of Jesus speaks more forcefully into this question than anybody’s, but also because I think Christian communities in particular need to have this discussion, because, as Bonhoeffer’s famous quote goes, “silence in the face of evil, is evil itself.”
“Keep calm and carry on” is a charming mantra of defiance when a hostile enemy is bombing your country. But when traumatised and homeless people are slumming on your borders, while you, and everyone else, bomb their countries back home, “keep calm and carry on” becomes the mantra of diabolical evil. I made this record around the refugee crisis, because everything is changing and we need a new mantra.
Well, nothing else for it but to go and buy it! If you want to hear more of BB’s reflections on the refugee crisis, this insightful article is a good place to start. If you’d like to hear more about the man himself, one of the more junior members of our team interviewed him in a bit more detail a few years ago and you can find that interview here and here.
Oh, and one last thing. If you’re at the Catalyst Festival this year, Benjamin Blower will be performing on Monday afternoon. If you’re not at the Festival, it’s another reason why coming along may not be such a bad idea. Just saying 😉
A couple of weeks back, we highlighted Stewart Garry’s exciting new project Sojourner. Basically, Stewart is one of the country’s finest acoustic guitar talents, particularly specialising in fingerstyle, and ‘Sojourner’ is an album and a film, recorded live at a number of locations that have inspired him in his writing (from a lighthouse on the outskirts of Newcastle to a Scottish whisky distillery). Sojourner was officially released yesterday, but we caught up a couple of weeks back to find out more about the project and the man himself…
So Stewart, introduce yourself.
Hi, my name is Stew Garry, I’m 27 years old, currently based in Coventry but originally from Newcastle upon Tyne. I’m a part time student studying theology and also work part time as an elder for my church in Coventry whilst continuing to play music when and where I can.
I’ve always been into music. Growing up, my parents brought me up on a solid foundation of jazz music- Miles Davis and Louis Armstrong stand out as people who I still love to listen to and inspire my writing! I started out playing penny whistle in school folk groups (ending up playing on ITV at one point somehow?) but quickly had a fascination for all musical instruments, playing violin, steel pans and various other instruments until I was settled on the drums. I joined a rock band aged 13/14 playing mainly black sabbath covers, which was truly awful! But we got this gig playing at an opening of a local studio in Newcastle. So we played our set, thought we’d nailed it and on walks this older guy, with a beat up guitar. I’m thinking ‘who’s this guy?’ And he plays one of the most stunning pieces I’ve ever heard on the guitar! The guy’s name is Tommy Emmanuel and he was playing his version of ‘Somewhere over the Rainbow’. Needless to say when I picked my jaw up from the floor, I dropped my drumsticks and said ‘I’m going to do that!’. Ever since I’ve been trying to work out how to play guitar like that, looking at other great guitarists like Andy McKee, Don Ross, Eric Roche and Antoine Dufour for technique and Inspiration.
Throughout that time I also played in a lot of different bands, jazz (which was a must to try and play like Miles) and rock bands, including a post hardcore band called Juinera where I got to play alongside Chris Donald who produced this album.
How did you come up with the whole idea for Sojourner?
I composed this album bit by bit over the last 4 years, gigged it and refined it until I was ready to record. I tried a few times to record the album in a studio, but for whatever reason, it wasn’t sounding right.
One day, Chris and I were talking about how much YouTube was playing a role in the rise of modern Fingerstyle guitar playing and he had the idea of doing a live film, where we would visit different places that have inspired my music.
There are so many factors that have gone into Sojourner. I love the way that it’s not just a collection of songs, but a laying bare of the factors behind the songs and of you as an artist. One of the key elements seems to be place and geography as you record all the songs in places that have inspired your writing. How do you feel place and location affects your art?
Yeah, something I love about instrumental music is that it evokes different things for different people, it allows the listener to engrave their own stories onto the music which I think is awesome! But for this album I thought it would be great to bring the listener into some of my thoughts about the compositions and what inspires me, that way I think people who may struggle with instrumental music might be able to understand where I’m coming from as well.
Playing live at the different locations was a really fun way to record, it makes everything more relaxed! You’re not shoved into a small booth, with microphones thrown in every direction at you! It’s just playing that music I love to play in the places that are special to me, which was a huge joy! I think that made all the difference to the album, each place had a unique look, sound and feel. For example ‘After the rain’ was played in this little chapel in Cornwall that me and some friends visited a lot, so I had some great memories of the chapel but also the reverb in there was awesome, the weather played a part as well! It had just rained and so it made filming there even more perfect.
How does your art fit into your role as a church leader? In what ways do you find the two a natural fit or a source of tension?
I love doing both music and church work! I think having both aspects of music and church works well. Music is an outlet of creativity, I see it as a sabbath activity, it’s restful and brings joy, it’s also worship whenever I’m playing. Church work allows me to spend a lot of time studying the Bible which is a great joy, the more I study the more I learn about Jesus which in turn inspires me to write! So I think the two overlap nicely. The only tension would be touring and how that works alongside church, but it’s a small tension and one that is usually easily workable.
When the project is fully released on 16th May, what can we expect?
The project will be sold in various formats. You can get it digitally or physical copies. It will come as a CD/DVD double disk, so you can watch the film or just sit back with a dram and listen to the album. You can order the album/film from the Minor Artists shop (you can get it from bandcamp or iTunes but we would prefer if you could get it from us directly).
Thanks Stewart. If he hasn’t convinced you to shell out for this fantastic project, let the music speak for itself: here is the second video from the project (featuring Sputnik favourite Joanna Karselis) to whet your appetite:
It was great to meet Phil and Harri Mardlin early last year at our first SputnikDay, and ever since we’ve been chatting about how to connect with and serve actors more effectively. We thought it was about time to bring you in on the conversation, particularly because we’ve got some schemes fast approaching that we’d love all of you script writers and actors to get involved with. So, to that end, we caught up with Phil…
So, Phil, introduce yourself.
Hi. My name is Phil Mardlin. I started LifeBox Theatre Company with my lovely wife, Harriet. So many theatre companies just don’t make it in today’s competitive market place so we wanted to make sure we ran a company that made us money and allowed us to work artistically. So, we have two strands to our company; we specialize in forum theatre, delivering training around communication issues in healthcare, education and business and we also provide actors for other training companies that deliver communication based training to businesses across the region. Artistically, we run an annual new writing festival in Bedford called StageWrite, which has just run for the 4th year. We take unsolicited scripts for much of the year (this year we had a record 67 scripts submitted) and then we select 8 and put them on, script-in-hand over 4 nights in front of an audience. After each performance we have a question and answer with the writer, director, actors and the audience to help them develop the piece further. We tend to select one of the strongest pieces and, working with the writer, help them take the piece to full production with a short tour.
How did you get into acting and who are your main inspirations?
Well, after a career as a children’s cancer nurse, followed by 8 years as a lecturer in children’s nursing, I had a very early mid-life crisis and gave it all up to become an actor! Madness, I hear you cry… and you’re probably right but, it’s the best decision I ever made. I was too old and with too many responsibilities to be able to go to drama school so I did a degree in English and Theatre and managed to bag a first class honours! Since then, largely through our company, I’ve discovered directing and writing and love being able to switch between the two of them, plus being a performer, depending on the project.
As for inspirations… gosh, that’s hard because I have so many! I remember going to see Waiting for Godot with Patrick Stewart, Sir Ian McKellan and Simon Callow and just watching it thinking, if I can’t be that good, is it worth bothering? Of course it is, and whilst I will never be in that league, I know I’ve always got something to aim for. As a writer, I am heavily influenced by Alan Bennett. He’s so incredibly observant about life and, having performed in The History Boys, I find that he writes in such a way that every word seems to logically follow on from the next. I know that sounds strange but it meant that it was just one of the most joyous and easy scripts I’ve ever learned.
How do you see your faith and your creativity coming together?
I don’t really see creativity as an extension of faith because the two things are inextricably linked and, for me, one can’t exist without the other. For me, being a child of God is at the very core of who I am. When I live out of that place, anything I do, creative or not, should come from a place of desiring to please Him and serve Him. I would also add that doesn’t mean everything I do creatively is ‘about’ God but it is ‘for’ Him. Much of what I do either as an actor, director or writer, I do because I believe in the message of the story or the impact and questions it might raise in those who engage with it. Sometimes, that means engaging in a world that might, on the face of it, seem quite dark. I believe that sometimes, to reach the people in those dark places, you have to reflect back their world to them, and theatre and film can do that very well; what you then do with what you are shown is the responsibility of the observer.
How will you be involved at the Catalyst festival this year?
I am so excited to be involved with Catalyst this year and, along with a few others, we are going to be creating a space for emerging writers to see their work up on its feet with the help of professional actors. We will be working with selected scripts over the Sunday and Monday afternoons of the festival and this will culminate in a performance of the scripts on the Monday evening.
How can people get involved with this project?
If you are a writer, then we would love to read your script. We are looking for scripts of around 20 minutes in length, so it could be the opener to a bigger idea you have or it could stand alone as a short piece of theatre. It needs to require no more than 4 actors to put on. Depending on volume of scripts we can’t guarantee that we will be able to put them all on but we will give you some brief feedback if you would like it.
If you are an actor working professionally or with some relevant experience, then we would love you to get involved with us to work on the scripts and perform them on the Monday evening. If you are interested in either of these, please contact Jonny at jonny@creativeartsnetwork.co.uk. (Better be quick though as the deadline for scripts is 15th May)
How do you think churches can support actors more effectively?
Good question. I could probably write for hours on this but ultimately it’s about communicating. I think the biggest thing you can do as a church to support actors is to simply engage with them. Invite them for lunch (we’re generally poor so free food is always a bonus) and talk to them. Too often, actors and creatives generally are seen as mavericks and people don’t often have a box to put them in. So talk to them, listen to them, hear them and seek to understand them.
Phil Mardlin, together with his wife Harri, heads up the theatre companies LifeBox Theatreand Stagewrite. He is also a member of The Kings Arms Church in Bedford and this year was responsible for putting on the first Passion Play Bedford’s seen in over 3 decades. And here’s how it happened…
Bedford’s last Passion Play was over 30 years ago but that changed this year. Back in June of last year, I was approached by Cally Lawrence, a director friend of mine who had been asked if she would direct a Passion play for the town by a committee of local churches. She readily agreed thinking this would be a great community event for the town. So with an agreement in principle, she came to me to see if I would be happy to write it.
The committee wanted to access funding from the Passion Trust (I didn’t even know they existed, but they do) and one of the requirements for funding is that it needs to be a brand new script. Now, I’ve been a Christian for the best part of 25 years and, in my arrogance, I figured that as I knew the story pretty well, this would be an easy task; I couldn’t have been more wrong. When I finally got down to writing it, it’s amazing how many discrepancies you find in the Gospel accounts. One writer describes the two Marys arriving at the tomb, experiencing an earthquake, seeing the stone being rolled back and the guards becoming like ‘dead men’ as an angel appears. Another account suggests that the two Marys were with Salome and when they arrived at the tomb, the stone was already rolled away and the angel was inside the tomb, whilst another describes more than one angel appearing. You get the picture. Suddenly making a coherent narrative that includes all these perspectives suddenly becomes a little more taxing. But we got there and by the end of the summer we had a working script and rehearsals were under way.
Now to make this work we needed a cast which included a chorus of 50- 60 minimum. By January, however, we had a loyal following of about 6 who were turning up to rehearsals regularly. Therefore we put out some bulletins and pleas for help, letting people know that if they wanted this to happen then we needed them to step up to the plate and to come along to a rehearsal on a Saturday towards the end of January. Well God certainly motivated people at that stage and about 40 turned up. It looked like this was going to happen after all. Now, the only caveat that the committee were given was that Jesus had to be a professional actor. This seemed a perfectly reasonable request since it’s a huge role and undertaking even for a good amateur actor so, with that in mind, Cally began auditioning prospective Jesus-es. Now, ironically, some might say, Judas never turned up for rehearsals so the mantle of betrayer fell to me… which I was secretly quite glad about since I hadn’t initially thought that I would want to perform in it. With time drawing nearer some of the practical difficulties started to become evident such as the need for crosses, stage combat experts, etc. Then we met Alyssa, an incredibly talented woman whose job is choreographing stage combat and specialising in Roman times and crucifixions! This amazingly talented woman built us 3 crosses, choreographed all our fight scenes and then took the part of one of the criminals. We also had donkey-crises, followed by dove-crises that all had to be resolved and time was ticking on.
As the day drew nearer I’d be fibbing somewhat if I told you there weren’t some nervous and anxious conversations with regards to working with a large number of complete non-actors on a performance that’s in the open air and that you can’t really have a proper dress rehearsal for; in this situation you’re never entirely sure what might happen on the day. But the day came, the weather was on our side, and we duly kicked off Bedford’s first Passion play in over 30 years. And what a time we had. We had no idea how many would come out for it – I think if we were honest we hoped we might get a couple of hundred out to see it – but by the time we had arrived at Castle Mound for the crucifixion, the tentative guesses of numbers sat somewhere between 1500 and 2000 people following the procession through the town. It was incredible. To both be involved in it and to see elements of such hard work come together. A motley crew of rag tag church goers had come together, with mostly no acting experience and pulled off the seemingly impossible. I know that both Cally and I couldn’t have been more proud of this group of people who had worked so hard to pull this off. Feedback on the day was so positive with comments around how immersive the experience had been and how the chorus had brought such a degree of reality to it as they spread rumours through the crowd and informed them of what was happening and what Jesus had done. So… if you’re thinking of putting on a Passion Play in your local town next year I’ve got two pieces of advice: 1) Go for it – yes, it’s hard work but it’s so worth it and 2) get started… it was almost a year in the making and time’s ticking on.
Hey Simon, tell us a little bit about yourself and your work..
Hey! I’m a landscape and documentary photographer based in Manchester. I also manage The Anchor Coffee House, which is owned by Vinelife Church, which is an absolute pleasure. I moved up here from Hampshire nearly 10 years ago to study music and now I take pictures and make coffee, which is a really nice balance. I’m married to Sarah, who studied textiles down in Falmouth and is now training to be a midwife, so essentially, two southerners living in Manchester who’ve taken their time working out what they want to do in life, but we’re getting there!
What made you want to become a photographer?
I’m not sure I’ve ever been asked that before! I’ve always enjoyed creating, and up until a few years ago, I’d thought I’d end up being a musician, but when I started experimenting with cameras I discovered that I see things differently to other people. I enjoy the process of creating something concrete that was tangible, a moment in time captured, but the photographer has license to create something literal or true or to create their own take on events through creative techniques. There is a huge responsibility on the image maker to create something that they can justify, but that depends on your motivation. My landscape work in inspired by God’s creation and I feel a need to capture that in images that I hope others can enjoy, which comes with a certain amount of artistic license. My documentary work requires a brutal honesty, that’s not to say I can’t work creatively and use metaphor in order to build a story, but I have a responsibility to tell the truth and not embellish anything because of my own motivations, and then my commercial work is created for someone else, so I have to understand what they’re seeing and interpret that through my images.
We love your current project The Edges of These Isles, what was the inspiration behind this project?
Thanks! Tom and I got to know each other whilst undertaking a Three Peaks challenge (Ben Nevis, Scafell Pike & Snowdon in 24 hours) and we’d both independently decided that we wanted to focus on landscape work, so we thought, why not go exploring together! We asked friends to recommend some of their favourite locations from across the UK, and over the past couple of years, we’ve been visiting them in order to create work that will be exhibited in Manchester at The Whitworth in September. So far, we’ve been up to Lindisfarne, Buttermere, Glen Coe, the Brecon Beacons and the Gower Peninsula, all of which have been inspiring and exhausting in about equal measure! Our final trip is the Causeway Coast in Northern Ireland next month, then it’s on to preparing for the exhibit and designing and printing the book. We’ve just started up an instagram account so everyone can see what we’re up to!
What has it been like collaborating with an artist on this project? Has this altered your practice in any way?
It’s an intriguing combination, not something that I’ve seen much before really. On our first trip up to Buttermere, I set up my camera by the water and took a few shots, then turned around ready to move on and Tom was just about getting his sketchbook and chalks out! So I ended up sitting in that one spot, watching the light to change, and the shadows move across the lake, giving me time to experiment with some different filter combinations, it really helped me consider the images I wanted to create. We also get to have these long winded in depth conversations on our huge journeys whilst listening to our niche ambient electronic record collections, which goes a long way to informing the decisions we make about the work we’re creating and how we want the viewer to engage with it. Tom work’s with homemade pigments, paint and wax to create these amazing, and often abstract, impressions of the landscape before him, which may well be influenced by a mountain ridge or the mist or a tone, where as my photography works on a much larger and more scale and is very literal, so I’m looking forward to our editing process and seeing which pieces work well together and how they inform one another.
Who or what has been the biggest single influence on your way of thinking?
I can’t draw on one influence really. I try and soak up as much photography work as possible, read journals, go to shows, have conversations with other photographers and people involved in photography, and each of those aspects will help build my understanding of the medium and inform how I create images. I’m always trying to develop my eye, my understanding of what a photograph can be and appreciating how the viewer may or may not respond, because my emotional attachment to an image that I’ve created can be vastly different from theirs. I try to avoid imagery that is on trend, I want the work that I go on to create to last a lot longer than I do, so I’m exploring different means to encourage a deeper appreciation of my subject matter that allows the viewer to truly engage. A lot of it is about educating yourself in understanding what has gone before you, being able to appreciate the constant evolution of photography and also why people connect with an image. The fact that an image from Ferguson shot by a bystander on an iPhone can end up on the cover of TIME tells you all you need to know about how photography is changing, and the new generation of photographs is appreciating that you can be just as inspired as an image your find online that someone with no public profile has taken, just as much as something by one of the greats.
What do you currently shoot with?
I’ve never been that fussed about gear. I’ve got a Canon 6D and a Fufi X100s which I can carry everywhere. I’ve toyed with film, I’m currently trying out my dad’s old box brownie with some medium format film, which is really new to me, but is helping me slow down when I take my images, which is something I’ve tried to do, but which digital just doesn’t give you space for. I think as soon as I’m shooting a documentary project that is just stills, medium format will be the way forward, to help me build a stronger aesthetic to my work and be more considered when working.
Your Loved and Lost project is really touching, what was the biggest challenge working with such an emotional concept?
Thank you. Loss is not an easy subject for most people to talk about, which is the reason I wanted to start the project, to open up that conversation. I’ve had to have a lot of meetings with medical and mental health experts, read up on the subject and process my own experiences, having lost my dad to cancer, in order to build the project to where it is today. The greatest challenge for me is working with the participants in order to gain a true understanding of the depth of their experience of loss whilst also making it a constructive and, if possible, a positive experience for them. I’m just about striking that balance, but I have a few ideas on how the process can be improved. If it can be a cathartic experience for the participant, that’s great, and if what they are sharing can inform and comfort the viewer, even better.
What are you currently fascinated by and how is it feeding into your work?
I’m currently working with a new collective on a project about fashion, so I’ve got my head into the ways in which uniform forms identities and how people build their own uniforms for work or social wear in an attempt to stand out or fit in. It’s great to be working with a broad variety of other photographers, even though none of us started out with a strong interest in fashion, we’ve talked about it for hours together and those conversations have begun to inform what we’re researching and shooting, which is really exciting.
What are your top tips for people just starting out as photographers?
Keep exploring and taking images! I’ve spent years refining the type of work I want to take, the aesthetic I want to create with different styles of work and building up an understanding of the medium in order to try and create work that the viewer can connect with in a meaningful way. I don’t know if I’m quite there yet, it’s a long game! I’ve never studied photography, so I had to learn about the history, the work of great photographers and try out loads of different techniques through trial and error, lot’s of things didn’t work out, and it’s especially frustrating when a commercial job doesn’t go as smoothly as you’d like, but you learn each time and grow for next time.
Minor Artists is part record label, part collective and part music production company. Founded by Sputnikmagazine contributor Chris Donald a couple of years back, it already has at least three bona fide classics under its belt- mSTORK’s ‘The Crux’, Benjamin Blower’s ‘Kingdom vs Empire’ and Ebenezer’s ‘Outremer’, but its forthcoming project is its most ambitious yet.
On the back of a successful Kickstarter campaign, ‘Sojourner’ will be released in 16th May. It’s a cinematic folk album (which I think means that it’s an album and a film) by one of the UK’s finest acoustic guitar talents, Stewart Garry.
Stewart has built a career playing around UK venues, but in ‘Sojourner’ he returns to places that have inspired his writing, from Laphroaig Distillery on the Scottish island of Islay to a lighthouse in the outskirts of Newcastle. The album was recorded live in these diverse locations and filmed simultaneously and last week, the project’s first offering: ‘The Don’ was released. It’s a video featuring beautiful imagery of Islay, a short interview with Stewart and of course the song itself, performed in the cavernous depths of the island’s famous whiskey distillery.
It’s the perfect way to experience Stewart Garry, infusing his very tactile music with a powerful sense of place while exposing the intense physicality of his style.
We’re hoping to grab an interview in a couple of weeks, but to tide you over we thought we’d just point you towards ‘The Don’ and let you see/hear for yourselves:
“Art shapes thought, and thought shapes life”: The Sputnik maxim speaks not just of the ‘fine’ arts such as painting and sculpture but also of all types of art; high and low, public and private, global and local alike.
From the images that dominate billboards to the tunes that hum out from the radio, our cultural furniture helps shape the way we think, both collectively and individually. It becomes our language, our words, and our means of understanding and interpreting life itself. This is by no means a purely negative phenomenon, without these systems of cultural significance and value judgements, we would have no readily available means by which we would measure worth.
All cultures have ideological circuits in which certain ideas and ideals are upheld, and other concepts are rejected. To use an example from within Christianity, certain church denominations will sing their own songs, build their own kind of buildings, publish their own brand of books, and ultimately uphold their own ideology. I became a Christian in a Pentecostal church and am attending a Pentecostal bible college: from the index of books in our library through to one of our lecturer’s own rendering of church history, our culture is saturated with this denominational stance.
The same would be true in wider culture. The books we read, the songs we sing, and the media we watch all contribute to the ideological circuit we are operating within.
Though ideological circuits are by no means ‘closed’, they certainly do legitimize their own orders, and therefore refrain from questioning their own authority. Though an abstract reality, the circuit is upheld through concrete and physical means; art, music, advertising, and so on.
Cildo Meireles’ Insertions into Ideological Circuits (1970) sought to insert ruptures into these systems of circulation. The Banknote Project printed politically volatile anti-US messages onto US dollars and Brazilian bank notes in both Portuguese and English such as ‘Yankees Go Home’ and ‘Straight Elections’. The mobile graffiti attached itself onto the symbols of cultural power, and were unknowingly circulated around, under the nose, and in the guise of the dominant order.
The Coca-Cola Project similarly printed such statements onto glass coca-cola bottles that were recycled back into production. These symbols of the American dream thus became vehicles of the subversive messages that sought to undermine their hegemonic control over cultural manufacture: a witty take on the ‘message in a bottle’. Meireles’ resistance art attempted to, in a brief moment, destabilize the ostensible reign of American capitalism oppressing the Brazilian artist’s homeland (the Coca-Cola bottle had become an image of US imperialism in Brazil.)
Ultimately Meireles points to the existence of these controlling circuits, and also to their passivity to the individual agent. There are cracks in the current order: the objects that embody unquestionable cultural authority temporarily became messengers of treason to their consumerist kings. In this, Meireles looks to an exchange of information independent of a centralized system of production. By transmitting an opposing message through hijacking the (literal) currency of cultural exchange, the artist is able to demystify the claims to absolute authority.
As implied above, Western Christians, with our sanctified radio stations, denominational publishing houses, and holy film industries tend to create our own ideological circuits that can be equally unforgiving to the external. And so, as Christians who engage in a culture with an alternative (dare we say, defiant) perspective, how are we to make inserts into the ideological circuits around us? We, with Meireles acknowledge, “the container always carries with it an ideology”, and so how are we to insert the ‘counter-information’ of the Kingdom? For example, the Kingdom principles of love and the absolute value of the human being in the face of a demoralizing system that further impoverishes and punishes the poor for being poor?
I do think that it is of interest that biblically, Yahweh is seen to wrestle with the circuits of language by modifying phrases in cultural circulation through the prophets (“the children’s teeth are set on edge” in Ezekiel 18 and Jeremiah 31). Doesn’t Jesus deliberately re-assemble the law in the Sermon on the Mount as well (You have heard it was said… but I say to you…)?
As Christian artists who believe that we live in a world under the ideological influence of the “god of this world” (2nd Corinthians 4:4), is our response to create our own circuit in which we isolate ourselves, or are we to make insertions into dominant ideological circuits around us? If so, how are we to subvert the current system?
What I am speaking of here is not the poles of east and west, north and south, capitalism and communism, or even sacred and secular, but the divisive “the Kingdom is like…” that seems to cut through all of these binary opposites. The ‘us vs. them’ dichotomy simply is not part of the dialogue; rather it is ‘us and Him’.
This interview with Jake Isaac originally featured in Creative Arts Network’s Motive edition of Hue magazine, and was then reposted on the Creativeartsnetwork.co.uk. To purchase a copy of Hue, click here. (PS, you can get a bargain with discount code ‘HUEFLASH’)
Jake Isaac is a worship pastor based at Christian Life Fellowship in Greenwich, London as well as the visionary and team leader of the iEC Band developed to inspire young Christians to draw closer to God in worship and bring about change in their world. The band released their second live album ‘Break These Chains’ and were MOBO nominated in 2010. Jake is also a singer/songwriter and had previously worked with artists such as Gabrielle, Blue, Miss Dynamite, Floetry and Duffy.
If you could sum up in three words why you do what you do, what would they be?
To move people.
Can you tell us about the first time you realised you wanted to create music?
I was eight years old. I just wanted to make the stuff I heard in my head and in my heart, even if I was actually unsure of what I was actually hearing, I knew I wanted to try. I reckon that’s where it probably all started to kick off for me.
What motivated you to want to be a singer/songwriter?
I wasn’t actually interested, it was my close mates at the time that said I should give it a try. I totally didn’t see it.
Can you tell us a little about the journey and experience of putting down on paper your first few songs?
They were absolutely corny! I wrote some horrid stuff, like really super corny. The kind of stuff if anyone was to sing now, people might just whip out the old tomatoes and plaster them. But I had to start somewhere, no matter what how embarrassed I felt, I knew I needed to practice writing and singing what was buried within me.
What was the main incentive or driving force behind writing in the first place?
Trying to communicate how I felt about different aspects of life. Almost finding the sounds and melodies to communicate the words as more than just a conversation.
Even though the experience of writing has probably changed somewhat, has the original motive changed or developed as your career has progressed?
I don’t actually feel it has. I feel like I’m just learning to grow in the process of becoming more disciplined in how I communicate in my songs. It’s almost like developing your vocabulary and becoming more articulate. It doesn’t mean you don’t pull out the cockney when you need to though.
As artists gain more public exposure many feel a pressure to ‘better themselves’ with each new release. Do you find you now write for the same reasons as before or does that pressure tailor how/what you create?
I feel like the pressure is totally healthy! Sometimes it’s a bit of a burden, but in order to better yourself, pressure will have to be applied at some point.
What are your hopes for the future of your music? Have you thought about the next three to four years?
I have thought about the next three to four years, but then I tell myself to behave!
I think I just look forward to sharing my music far and wide and developing and expanding my sound. Honestly that’s a shed load of stuff to deal with on its own.
What drives you to keep creating new material?
My everyday experiences and my conversations with various people on a day to day basis, which causes me to want to communicate something on their behalf that they might not be able to do in the same way as me.
Can you share some advice for any young songwriters reading this?
This is all about the people on the other end, the listener.
Conversations are normally directed at other people and you need to see your songs in the same way. Your songs are conversations out loud with the listener. What you get out of writing, not matter how fulfilling it is, is only part of the process.
In order to reach more, try and write with more and more people in mind. It’s like making a product without knowing your target audience; only you as the investor benefit from it. That’s not the way you branch out. But there’s only one of you. Be the one and only artist that you can be and enjoy it!
Great work Thinktheology and Nathanael Smith for not playing it safe with Tuesday’s post- a review of Robert Eggers’ ‘The Witch’ and general reflections on the horror genre. The guys at Think asked me to do a sort of companion piece that went up there on Wednesday, but I thought I’d share it here as well.
Should Christians watch horror movies? Twenty years ago, in the kind of churches I grew up around, this question would have been met with a uninanimous and curt response and Nathanael Smith would have probably found himself facing something not dissimilar to the Salem witch trials!
Things have moved on and for some that is enough to settle the argument. Christians have made our peace with Dungeons and Dragons and Harry Potter, it’s only natural that we’d continue to repent of all of yesteryear’s knee jerk cultural prejudices.
However, it’s really important that we stop and think this through. I’ve got mixed feelings about the way the church interacts with art (in all its shapes and sizes) nowadays, and as someone who helps lead a church and spends a lot of my time working with artists, I’ll be honest, I’m still working this stuff through. However, I’ve got a few thoughts that I’d like to throw into the pot:
1. We are not to be undiscerning consumers
Andy Crouch charts the Western church’s shift in how it interacts with culture largely as a shift from a posture of wholesale condemnation through to undiscerning consumption. He warns of the risks in such a position:
‘…consumption, as a posture, is capitulation: letting the culture set the terms, assuming that the culture knows best and that even our deepest longings (for beauty, truth, love) and fears (of loneliness, loss, death) have some solution that fits comfortably within our culture’s horizons, if only we can afford to purchase it.’(Culture Making, pp 95-96)
In all of these discussions, I fear that for many of us, when we hear ‘if your conscience allows it’ (which I fully agree with by the way) we hear an encouragement to capitulation. Our consciences certainly have an objective Holy Spirit element to them but they are also educated and trained and they can be seared, it seems, almost beyond repair (1 Tim 4:2). One of the main ways I have learnt to hone my conscience has been by wrestling at length over the art I indulge in. I have smashed more records and CDs, binned more DVDs and stopped halfway through more TV series than I can count. I felt God prod me that some were leading me towards sin, others were leading me to think in unhelpful ways and others just needed to go as I was more interested in them than in Jesus at that time. I have found this costly- both financially and in terms of losing things I loved- but the payback has been that I’ve learnt to hear the nuances of God’s voice as I’ve learnt to discern the prod of the Spirit and obeyed Him along the way.
2. As we think about the true, right and lovely, we must find a place for the ugly, wicked and horrific
Whatever decisions we make regarding specifics though, we must find a place for horror in our lives! When I was growing up, Philippians 2:8 was used pretty liberally to warn me off a whole host of evils. However, I can’t help thinking that Paul’s teaching here has been somewhat abused. Paul teaches the Philippian church to ‘think about such things’ (the true, noble, right, etc) which is very different to ‘only think about such things’. If he’d done the latter, he would have been making the rather radical move of prohibiting serious reflection on large chunks of the Old Testament. Ezekiel would be considerably shorter (Ezekiel 16? 23?) and Judges 19-21 would certainly have to go (imagine Eli Roth getting his hands on that particular passage).
God chose to expose us to the horrific effects of sin in his own perfect word and he hasn’t spared us any of the gory details. It is totally understandable why many Christians treat Christianity as a bunker to hide away in, safe from the horrors of the world, but that’s not what it was ever meant to be. We are meant to be able to look evil in the face, acknowledge head on the depths of depravity in the world and then give our lives to the one who crushed the snake’s head in a bid to rescue people and refashion our culture. A church that ponders flowers, eagles and sun rises all day will likely develop a fairly rose tinted view of the world. God however chose to motivate his people into action by encouraging us to dwell on stories of gang rape, dismembered corpses and donkey’s genitalia. It’s certainly not meant to be entertaining, but if an irregular dose of some cinema that may be deemed slightly unsavoury can wake us up to the horrors of the real world we live in and the desperate need for us to do something about it, then it may be worth a few sleepless nights.
3. Living in Babylon means learning the culture
As I’ve thought about the shift in the church’s attitude to culture, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s largely down to a change in perception of where we live, spiritually speaking. In my early years, Christian leaders talked as if we lived in Israel. Once into my twenties, the general concensus was that we were in Athens. But as has pointed out on this very site, we are now squarely rooted in Babylon.
Therefore, Daniel is a very helpful model for us. He was immersed into Babylonian culture (Dan 1:4) and took the assignment on with some gusto. Of course, he did need to take a stand for righteousness, but he did this by resolving not to defile himself with the literal consumables he was given; he did not seem to fear the cultural produce he would have been filling his mind with every day.
In Daniel’s footsteps, we must learn the language and literature (and music and film and theatre and visual aesthetic) of our culture. As someone who leads a Christian art network, I’m particularly interested in how we apply this by subverting these norms into high quality, culturally incisive art that can speak back into the culture, however, this can be applied much more broadly to all who want to understand the state of play around us and communicate meaningfully to those outside the church.
In conclusion, I’m not sure exactly how we tie all of these threads together, but I’m convinced that we need to. We have to learn to value what is good and be careful in how we nurture righteousness in our thoughts, words and deeds, but at the same time, we must become more robust, so that we can stomach what Babylon feeds us- in virtually all its forms, artistic or academic- and use it to overthrow, or even better redeem, that horrific city.
Christian theology has the tendency to exalt the abstract and immaterial over the corporeal and transitory parts of creation. When I was baptised, a scripture from Second Corinthians was given to me that spoke about how “the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal” (2 Corinthians 4:18). This understanding, when not tamed or tapered with an understanding of the full bodily incarnation of Christ can become dualistic and dichotomising (God “up there” far away, and us “down here”).
Here at Sputnik, we fully hold to the idea that “thought shapes art, and art shapes life”. The heaven-up, earth-below theological-thought-attitude that holds an inseparable chasm between ‘heavenly realities’ and ‘earthly things’ has undoubtedly infiltrated our art. The almost alien-like faces of Byzantine iconography stripped of any imperfections bears witness to this. When our understanding of life is stripped of all materiality and ‘flesh’, our art follows suit. Historically, we seem to have forgotten about the God who descended into clay, and then used dirt to restore sight to the blind.
Certain modernist artists have attempted to make their visual-theology more ‘earthy’ and have succeeded in their representations (Graham Sutherland, or Otto Dix are great examples). What I would like to ask in this short post is whether we should be going further than simply allowing some earth into our timeless representations?
Where film necessitates considerations of time and change in art, standard pictorial representation generally seeks to freeze it, glossing over it, and preserving the static. ‘A good painting is one that stands the test of time’; symbolically and physically. Should our creations continue in their insulation from time and mutation though? Are we to keep making monuments to eternity? Or does the unique incarnational story of Christ instead push us to become partakers in the mutable creation? Are we instead created to be collaborators with a fluid cosmos?
Anya Gallaccio is one of the generation of Young British Artists whose direct engagement with cultural materials and objects created both a sense of immediate recognition (the work is not too abstract, it is created with tangible objects that are instantly recognisable,) and contemplative dislocation (the work is somewhat transformed and ‘edited’, creating a realm of possible understandings of a given artwork) within the viewer.
Gallaccio’s most widely recognised work, currently housed in the Tate Britain, is Preserve ‘Beauty’ (1991-2003), a four panelled composition of 2000 gerberas encased in glass, fixed against the gallery wall.During the installation of this work the flowers wither and die, leaving stains on the gallery wall. What begins with a fresh smell and vibrant colours finishes with an odour of decay and an image of putrefaction.
Though Gallaccio’s wider body of work deals with natural processes of transformation, from melting 34 tons of ice from within with a 1.5-ton boulder of rock salt (intensities and surfaces, 1996) to the erosion of a 60-ton column of locally quarried chalk wrapped in plaster at sea off the coast of Hull (Two sisters, 1998), I find Preserve ‘Beauty’ particularly instructivebecause it actively speaks in to the aforementioned dialogue. The material and very ‘stuff’ of Gallaccio’s art is the changeable; the mutable objects through which Augustine claims we see “the God who made things, through the things which He made.”
This work serves as a soft critique of the institution (Tate) that it currently resides in. When ‘beauty’ is preserved, it dies. How can we then, as Christians and as creators cooperate with the transformability of nature, as agents of change and metamorphosis? A friend of mine described this different approach to participating in a changing creation rather than stagnating it and trying to ‘eternalise’ nature as the difference between a still pond and a flowing river.
A ‘good’ portrait sketch freezes and immortalises an ever-changing biological form. Is there a space for an art form that instead takes pleasure in the divine authorship of what St. Augustine aptly calls “these beautiful changeable things” in his Easter sermon of 411AD? Perhaps Gallacio’s work points us in the right direction.
Recently, I went to the circus for the first time. My parents never seemed to be very keen on the circus and my wife’s lingering memory of her one childhood visit was of mangy, ill treated tigers cowering in cages. However, when you’ve got three kids, it’s half term and Living Social are being generous- needs must!
Anyway, quite unexpectedly, I had a great time. Not only was it thoroughly entertaining, it was actually an instructive experience in artistic etiquette.
First off, I was taken aback by the level of skill on display. From the tired looking clown, whose feigned ineptitude enabled him to hoodwink 5 audience members into an absolutely brilliant piece of comic theatre halfway through (totally at their expense) to the Dynamite Riders trio who hurtled around a metal globe on their motorbikes at about a million miles an hour, these were exceptionally gifted performers who’d clearly given their lives to mastering their crafts.
But there was a joy and humility about the whole thing that was remarkable. My 7 year old was welcomed on the door by a friendly steward who turned out half an hour later to be a member of Trio Zetsimekov who were one of the main acts (doing this crazy thing with curtains, poise and an intimidating level of upper body strength). One half of Las Chicas Morales, the duo that kicked the show off by scaling and descending interlocking ramps while standing on enormous globes, painted the kids’ faces in the interval. Chico Rico, the clown, personally saw you out at the end.
Here was something truly unusual- extraordinary skill without any hint of celebrity or ego. And they were clearly having a whale of a time. The Bulgarian duo who performed all manner of gravity defying acrobatics upon ‘the wheel of death’ entered and exited beaming from ear to ear and gave every indication that they felt that it was a genuine privilege to be there. (To put this in perspective, the whole thing was in a tatty big top in a car park at Merry Hill Shopping Centre. All I can say, if you are not familiar with ‘Merry Hell’, is that this would not have been the most prestigious leg of the tour!)
It was remarkable, but I found it quite chastening too. I know that I’ve performed a number of gigs in quite the opposite manner. Perhaps the crowd was a little small, the sound system wasn’t quite up to scratch, the promoter was a bit unhelpful. For whatever reason, I know that at times I’ve performed with a grumpy functionality and have acted before and after my performance with an aloofness that demonstrated that I’d bought a very twisted view of the role of the artist. The artist as one who is there to be served. The main event. The one whose name is on the flyer. Who people have come to see. Paid to see. Someone incredibly special. What’s funny is that I’ve even felt this way sometimes when my name wasn’t on the flyer, there was no admittance fee and nobody had actually come to see me anyway!
Gandeys Circus troupe reminded me of something. The artist is essentially a servant. We have been gifted with talents and skills and hopefully we’ve put time and effort into nurturing these gifts but we are there to serve not to be served. This may involve providing entertainment, it may involve providing a challenge. In fact our service may be to make our audience feel decidedly uncomfortable, but we are there for them. Therefore, we should always do it with joy and humility.
The models in most of our fields will be demanding, self serving egotists and we must be under no illusions- they will affect us. As we follow Christ in our art, we must not then just concern ourselves with our content, but also with our manner. I want to serve audiences with at least the same level of joy and humility as Gandeys Circus.
There’s a bunch of critically acclaimed films that have gone under many of our radars. In response I have started gathering a few friends together to watch some of these movies with me and then spend time afterwards arguing whether they merit the praise. The ensuing arguments will then be fed into reviews. To kick things off, Wong Kai Wai’s ‘The Grandmaster’.
The Grandmaster
Director: Wong Kar Wai
Genre: Martial arts drama set in the early 20th century
Released: 2013
Certificate: 15
Starring: Tony Leung & Zhang Ziyi
Rating system: This is my own little rating system: I consider 3 aspects of the film. Firstly the script, secondly the whole production and finally how strongly the film impacted me and provoked powerful ideas and intense conversation. In each category I give marks out of 10.
‘The Grandmaster’ has some things you’d expect from a kung-fu film including a final battle against an honourless villain, and some things you’d expect from a Wong Kar Wai film, namely an artful and quietly tragic love story. But what happens when these two genres collide?
Well, the mixture of styles and moods make for an odd but palatable film. ‘The Grandmaster’ has all of Wong Kar Wai’s signature quirks: melodramatic music, carefully placed visual poetry, ripples of regret and great cigarette smoking.
The fight scenes are stunning, but Wong Kar Wai seems averse to making a super-slick film –– some shots change speed (on purpose) midway through gradually becoming flickery. He chucks a pale blue, solarizing effect on some of the shots, which I can’t remember ever seeing before in a feature film, because it’s just weirdly unrealistic.
Thematically the film mourns the loss of ancient Chinese traditions and wisdom. There are some cracking quotes in it:
“Kung fu – two words – one horizontal, one vertical. If you’re wrong, you’ll be left lying down. If you’re right, you’re left standing.”
Repeatedly ‘The Grandmaster’ asks the viewer to consider what a well-lived life in tumultuous times might look like.
What I probably liked most about the film was that I only realized its pivotal scene, a beautifully choreographed battle, WAS the pivotal scene until much later. As the narrative progresses the two fighters evidently reminisce over that encounter, deftly coaxing me into their sorrowful nostalgia.
Yes, it’s an introspective kung fu flick about honour, regret, revenge and loss.
Your chance to respond:
Have you seen The Grandmaster? Or other Wong Kar Wai films like Chung King Express? What do you make of them?
Arie A. Galles’ (1944-) Fourteen Stations drawings take a radical departure from the customary representations of Christ’s Passion stations. Traditionally, viewers meditate upon a series of works that trace Christ’s physical and mental agony from condemnation through to resurrection. I would like this post to open a dialogue into how unorthodox approaches to the Passion can deepen our understanding of people, place, suffering and healing.
Station 7 – Dachau” 1999 47”1/2” X 75” Charcoal and Conte on Arches
Galles’ painstakingly mimicked aerial photographs of Nazi concentration camps based on Luftwaffe and Allied reconnaissance film. The meticulous drawings reproduce the mechanical photographs in incredible detail; the stations that were to be the final stations of millions of transported prisoners. There are four theological themes in this work I would like to contemplate.
Firstly is the theme of Kaddish; the Jewish burial prayer exalting God and yearning for the establishment of his Kingdom which is embedded in Hebrew and Aramaic through the series. Galles himself confesses, “The most sincere and honest way I know how to pray is through my work, So many people died in these camps, and there’s no one to say Kaddish for them.” In this we find a paradox; how can these depictions of the some of the cruelest and most heinous places in history come together to glorify the seemingly all-too-quiet God? The burial prayer reads, “May there be abundant peace from Heaven, and life upon us and upon all Israel”. The charcoal sketches proclaim a sense of immovable hope in death; quite characteristic of the historical Jewish faith, and the hope in the cross; possibly an aesthetic theodicy?
The most similar Biblical source to this enacted/embodied Kaddish would be book of Lamentations, traditionally ascribed to the prophet Jeremiah. The dirges and final psalm in the book are exemplars testifying to the marriage of craft and passion; of spontaneity and preparation. In both the Fourteen Stations and Lamentations, the laborious process involved in the works’ creation only intensifies the emotional turmoil portrayed. The artist-mourner writes, that the project “has been the most intense endeavor I have ever undertaken”.
Identification is also big theme in this work. It is most notable that some of the artist’s relatives died in Belzec, one of the camps drawn. The artist identifies the suffering and attempted annihilation of the Jewish people of last century with the crucifixion of Christ almost two thousand years ago. Is this to be read as a theological or simply art-historical theme?
The suffering of Jewish people today is therefore not isolated from the Jewish and Christian biblical accounts, and subsequently our minds are drawn to the Assyrian and Babylonian deportations, and the similar atrocities the people have survived. The ground of Jerusalem on which Christ (and many other patriarchs) suffered, the lost homeland, is somehow identified with these horrific places of utter desolation.
Finally, it is interesting that Galles spoke of a particular feeling of objectivity. Galles says he experienced the feeling of being “strapped to the belly of a bomber, looking down.”The aerial, God’s-eye view portrays an apparent scientific objectivity through which the viewer can leave with a haunting feeling of corporate responsibility. The atrocities are evident, and the passion is factual. The height and dislocation of both the photographic method and the birds-eye geographic view stand in tension with the intensely intimate reality of both the creative method and the on-the-ground systematic massacre.
Galles’ alternative stations come together in the creation of a distinct Passion narrative, one that prays, laments, identifies, and objectively condemns an irrefutable yet unthinkable period of recent history.
If you were familiar with the previous incarnation of Sputnikmagazine, you may have noticed a certain Stephen Adams (Re:Flex the Architect) in the contributors section. There was a song streamed with Barrowclough spouting something about Bart Simpson and a short interview, but since then very little has been heard from this shadowy Sputnik contributor. Until now.
For the last decade or so, Stephen Adams has been working away quietly establishing himself as one of the mainstays of Christian hiphop in the UK. In April 2014, we caught up with him about his involvement in the second album by US hip hop crew, Scribbling Idiots. We managed to pick his brains about working with the Scribbling Idiots and to tap into his wisdom on the strange science of beat making.
Hey, I’m Stephen Adams, also known as Re:Flex the Architect. I’m a hiphop Beatmaker/ MC/Mix Engineer. Living in London, but I’m a Polish-born, Leeds-raised Nigerian.
I’m part of the Scribbling Idiots crew, predominantly based in the US, but I’m one of two European members and the only Brit.
How did you get into making music and how did you hook up with the Scribbling Idiots?
Got into music when I was about 13. Heard some really cheesy youth-group type rap when I was young and for some reason that ignited a spark in me to rhyme. Later on, discovered US artists like Mos Def, Talib Kweli, Tunnel Rats, Grits, Blackalicious, Cross Movement, etc, whom I studied and learned the ropes of how to approach hip hop with a real passion for the craft.
I started producing really because I figured out quickly I needed stuff to rap over & I just assumed that rappers made their own beats at that time. My granddad bought me one of those Yamaha keyboard with the pre-arranged backing tracks. Graduated to the Boss DR-5 drum machine, which I really learned how to produce on for a number of years till I then graduated to more computer-based software. I always wanted the MPCs or the Logics or Pro-Tools everyone else seemed to have, but somehow I was able to make what I had work for me. Pretty much taught myself as I didn’t meet other people who were MCs or producers until I went to uni.
At about that time, I found an online forum called Sphere of Hiphop which had a ton of Christians who were passionate about good hiphop. I used to post some of my beats to get feedback and through that, started talking to CAS METAH, who co-leads Scribbling Idiots. He invited me to join the crew about 2001 and I’ve been their UK correspondent ever since 🙂
What do you feel are the main challenges for a Christian making hip-hop music?
Great question. There are surface challenges which get talked about a fair bit. Things like hip hop’s general attitude towards Christians, where artists are viewed with severe suspicion before you’ve even rapped or made a beat, because frankly, Christians have been occasionally responsible for some terrible hip hop music over the years (not all though). Meanwhile, the church as a whole tends to expect artists to only make musical doctrine statements to discourage youth group kids from sleeping around and leaves no room for artistic expression, growth or voicing your own personal struggles and opinions. Behind the sarcasm lies a large vein of truth.
It’s one of the reasons some of the people who currently inspire me are artists like Shad, who writes from what sounds like a clearly Christ-inspired worldview, but has stayed out of the “Christian music” clubhouse and is respected across the spectrum simply because he is undeniably dope! It’s also one of the things I love about my crew Scribbling Idiots and some of the other artists I work closely with like Tommy Eye or Wizdom (formerly of Greenjade), that we all inspire each other to make good music that steers clear of either of the above traps while still being true to our faith in Christ.
As a producer, it’s a tough one, because you have less control over the end product unless you want to stay in the Christian music ghetto. One of my big influences is a producer called S1 aka Symbolyc One, who has produced for Beyonce, Jay-Z and Kanye West, Game and more, but is a passionate follower of Christ. You’d think it must be tough for him to work on records that the end result may be promoting things he does not necessarily agree with, but to me, his faith shines through in how he goes about his business, the reputation he builds in the industry for his talent AND integrity and the lives he gets to speak into directly as a result.
It’s here that houses the real challenge for Christian in hip hop – to let your faith be seen in the closed-door business dealings and off-stage interactions. To be a man or woman of your word, honour the money, time and trust people invest in you, or to treat others well regardless of their status or immediate benefit to your career.
It’s more important that hip hop as a whole see my faith in action more so when they interact with me as Stephen Adams, far more than anything Re:Flex the Architect says in a verse. I’ve been on the receiving end of shady ethics and dishonesty from artists who share my faith and it makes you quite disillusioned. I try now to use it to remind myself to be better in the way I interact on a business level.
That’s where the real challenges are for me, ‘coz it’s hard to remember that my actions whether in business or in everyday reflect not just me, but how people see Jesus and the church as a whole.
While you are a gifted MC, you are most known for your beat making. For the uninitiated, what does this involve and how would you go about making a beat?
Haha! Cheers Jonny. Beatmaking, to me, is first and foremost about creating a feeling in the listener, whether it’s the rapper who has to write a song based on the emotions the beat evokes, or the listener hearing the final product. I’m always trying to create something that gives me that “Ooooooh” feeling. That feeling that makes me want to stop everything I’m doing, close my eyes, screw my face up like I just smelt something rotten while nodding my head violently! If the track makes me lose myself like that in it, then I know I’ve done my job right. Still a work in progress though.
Outside of manipulating samples and synth sounds, I play keys, drums and percussion to an average level, and am learning bass and guitar, so I try and incorporate either live instruments or at least some form of melody and musicality into the beats.
I’ll be shameless and use my crew’s newest release as an example (Scribbling Idiots – Invitation Only). I produced four songs on the record, but my favourite of them is a song called “Nothing to Prove” . I’ll break down in detail what I did on this one.
While crate digging, I found a 70’s jazz-fusion record where I recognized the “cast list” on the record sleeve had a few incredible jazz / funk musicians of that era playing on it. When I took it home & played it, I heard this incredible song with a gorgeous brass section and piano chords with a beautiful female lead vocal over the top. I hit this section where the singer hit this haunting long note while the brass section played these great riffs that instantly gave me that “Oooooooh!!!” feeling I was talking about earlier.
I sampled that section into the production software I was using, slowed it waaay down to 91bpm and chopped it – picked out the individual brass chords I wanted from different and rearranged them in a different order and style to create something different from the original – to sound more military-like while still maintaining that haunting musical feel of the original.
I grabbed and layered individual drum sounds I had and played a simple, but hard-hitting drum pattern with them from my Korg PadKontrol, ( a USB drum machine that allows you to play the sounds on your computer live). This gave the drums a more human feel, so it didn’t sound super-rigid like if I just programmed them. Then I played the bass guitar live for the verses and chopped it for the chorus to give it a variation.
The result was a track that sounds to me like a scene from a Marvel superhero movie or Leonidis’ last stand in 300. The MC side of my creative brain could picture a character sticking his chest out, digging his heels in and facing whoever comes against him with fiery confidence. CAS METAH who A&R’d the Invitation Only album, picked MCs for the track who, without any instruction from me, clearly felt the same qualities in the song and you can hear that echoed in their lyrics.
About a year ago, my friend Lex told me about a South African artist he’d got to know. I checked out his website and quickly realised that this was not some hobby-ist with a bit of a creative itch. Duncan Stewart is a painter and sculptor whose work is profoundly thoughtful and technically superb. His wide range, both in terms of style (oils, charcoal, bronze sculptures) and subject (addressing social, environmental and theological issues) is as impressive as his craftsmanship.
His raison d’etre, as expressed on the website’s ‘about’ tab also resonated with me:
‘Trust God and live life forward’ encapsulates my life’s philosophy… to do work that opens people’s hearts long enough, through whatever appeal my art may have, that the deeper narrative which imbues all my work, may be both ingested and digested.’
I caught up with Duncan to delve a little deeper.
Who are you and what do you do?
The short answer is that I am a human being whom God has graciously rescued from eternal destruction, in the process delighting my heart with a restored fellowship with Him and causing the gifts and passion He placed within me to be the vehicles which I now have the privilege of using for His glory and the blessing of others.
Even shorter answer: husband, son, brother, father, painter, sculptor, preacher, prayer, runner, paddler…in no clear order.
How did you decide to make art more than a hobby in your life?
Before Jesus interrupted my life, I never had the faith, vision or even desire to become an artist. I was hungry for the worldly promises of wealth and comfort which the life of an artist seemed completely incapable of achieving for me. Yet I always loved to draw things which ultimately translated into me keeping the flame of art alive through evening courses whilst working in the ad industry during the day. And then one day, God spoke to me from the story of Moses in Exodus, showing me that if I was willing to throw down what I had in my hand – my talents and artistic abilities, He could do in the supernatural what was impossible for me to do in the natural – use my work, my life, to lead others from captivity into freedom, into a promised land. I couldn’t imagine a more meaningful way to spend/invest my life. That moment, compounded by miraculous moments of divine provision and favour on my work, propelled me into the future I am now living but could never have dreamed of.
How would your art be different if you weren’t a Christian?
I think if I was not a Christian, I wouldn’t be an artist. My new identity – the person redefined by Christ on the cross, that person is an artist. The man I was prior to salvation had some artistic ability but the heart and passions, the fear controlling me then would have either sabotaged me or driven my work and my life in the pursuit of selfish pleasure, fame and fortune.
What would you like to achieve through your art in your lifetime?
Honestly, having my life/art play a role in the salvation of souls, millions or some part there-in.
The satisfaction and joy of redirecting vast sums of worldly wealth into the kingdom.
Influencing a whole industry to the truth and glory of God.
Model that the calling/living of an artist is a blessing and privilege, not requiring a host of dysfunctions or being subjected to poverty but rather a fountain of life and creativity and generosity and courage (not that I have achieved this, but I press on…:-)
What would be your advice to any young Christian artists finding it difficult to balance their art with the other demands of life (including church commitments)?
Know your boundaries and don’t be afraid to follow paths that others may judge as selfish.
Invest in yourself, your health, your talent, your education…value who God has made you to be, so that when you come to invest outwards – which is the goal, the outpouring of Christ is from a vessel that is whole.
Lose your religion ( viz. hypocrisy/legalistic spirit)….don’t be afraid to be seen and mix with people who aren’t Christians, true humility is a great weapon/tool for an artist.
Take time to rest, it may take more faith than to be busy but it is vital.
Be strict with yourself in practicing the daily discipline of seeking/being with Jesus.
Store compliments in your heart for encouragement when needed, not in your head which can get too big/proud; store criticism not in your heart where it can poison, but in your head where you can reflect upon it’s value and determine if you need to make correction or if it can be dismissed as irrelevant.
All church leaders I know say that they would like to both encourage artists (and creativity in general) in their churches, however thriving local church based artistic movements are few and far between. What do you think needs to change (in the churches and in the artists) for churches to start becoming homes for genuinely innovative and prolific art collectives?
From my experience there are at least 2 aspects that need consideration; the artist and the church/leadership of their local community.
Church side: I have the privilege of being in an extremely diverse community of people – black, white, rich poor, English and many other languages and nationalities and what I respect so much within our leadership is their vision and courage to create room for every member to explore and find their niche – the role God has uniquely gifted them to perform (1 Corinthians 12), creating opportunities within that for personal expression and challenge whilst recognising that it is God who brings the growth. They don’t always get it right, but one gets the deep sense that they are desiring to please God before man…which for me is key….they call us often into stretching, seemingly inconvenient relationships or tasks, gently but firmly. It is not necessarily always comfortable in our church – which is a good thing. So a leadership that is able to not box or over-administrate a church but desires to see a true reflection of the bride living in harmony with all its various parts…..so easy in words, so messy in life.
Artists side: What I have learnt is that we are not special, or rather more special, than anyone else. That we need to model the best of being an artist, even if it means giving when it hurts, helping, serving – playing out of position sometimes. We also need to be confident and secure in ourselves and with our leaders to trust them enough to be able to speak out our fears/dreams/frustrations so that they can position us better for success and connect us to a bigger picture. We need to share our gifts and talents (and ourselves) with the body to fulfill our unique God-given calling within and for the benefit and well-being of the whole body.
If you’ve enjoyed our interview with Duncan, please check out his website or like his Facebook page to get regular updates.
Hip hop has a very divisive position in our cultural consciousness. For some it is a force for good, for others, for ill. Some talk of it with an almost holy reverence, others dismiss it as childish and creatively backward. Whatever side of the fence you are on, though, it has become clear that it can no longer be dismissed as a novelty or a passing fad. By many measures, hip hop is the foremost genre in popular music worldwide today; it is an enormous cultural presence in our society with tremendous influence.
And, what’s more, this take over has taken a mere 35 years. It is this fact, maybe more than any other that reveals that, whatever your opinion of Run DMC, Jay-Z or Odd Future, there is a creative energy at the heart of this movement that is worth attention and respect.
In the late 70s, in a reasonably deprived area of New York, young black men and women with little access to the musical gateways of their day, literally started
a revolution. As the first DJs would hijack electricity from street lights to power the block parties from which hip hop was born, hip hop’s pioneers borrowed freely from musical styles and lyrical traditions to shape a new force in world music. This explosion may be hard for the uninitiated to discern from perusing the early releases of JVC Force or Roxanne Shante, but it is much clearer when taking a step back and witnessing the wider fall out. Musical technology suddenly leapt forward as modern prototypes of today’s DJ mixers and samplers appeared. Hip hop music instantly spawned (or at least redefined) innovations in almost every field of art- in the visual arts (graffiti), in dance (b-boying and breakdancing), beat-boxing, fashion, and on and on.
Hip hop at its essence is all about unbridled creativity; magpie-ing all that glitters in the near vicinity and creating something new and fresh.
This is why ‘The Quickener’, Joel Wilson’s debut film, billed as a medieval rap thriller, is not a rogue offering on the far left field of this strange cultural movement. It is hip hop.
On Saturday 21st September, I attended the premiere of Joel’s film at the Midlands Art Centre in Birmingham, with a mixture of excitement and trepidation. I knew the concept (set in Britain in the time of the Great Plague, something to do with a gargoyle, all dialogue rapped) but I still couldn’t see how (or if) it would work. Some had imagined it would be something like Martin Lawrence’s ‘Black Knight’- a transportation of black street culture into a world full of castles and banquets. I knew it wouldn’t be that. I was imagining something closer to a more monotone Les Mis.
Thankfully, what I witnessed was stylistically much more subtle. For the most part, the actors rapped in an almost freeform style, using authentic medieval vocabulary, while Pete Yelding’s excellent soundtrack settled inconspicuously into the background. Then, every now and again, organic percussion would drift into the mix and the delivery would become just slightly more syncopated. Suddenly rappers were exchanging lines back and forth to carry forward the plot, but then, almost before you noticed, it was back as you were, and you were almost watching a Shakespeare play. This worked brilliantly, drawing out the strength of rap as a style of communication, while dispensing of so many of its distractions.
This is not all that was positive about the film either. Far from it. It was beautifully shot throughout, with the feel of a superior BBC drama, the plot co
ntained a healthy mixture of logic and mystery, and the script was at times mesmeric in its poetry while clear enough to make sure the audience knew what was going on. All sorts of cheeky nods to classic rap groups and anthems kept the 90s hip hop geeks with a smile on their faces too.
It wasn’t perfect, but then again it was never going to be. Joel raised the entire finance and crew for this project from his own personal networks and though all involved acquitted themselves ably, a larger budget and an Adrien Brody/Black Thought hybrid at the centre of the piece would have been a bonus (obviously). The 30 minute running time was also an unavoidable drawback. It would have been great to allow the characters a bit more room to breathe and the plot a bit more time to marinate. But then again, this would have meant that it would not have fitted into any short film festival slot, so less people would see it. Joel, please take this as a plea for an extended DVD version.
Lets face it, this was a ridiculously ambitious debut. People who want to get into film making start with clever but obvious narratives and sparse screenplays set in minimal locations, with two or three main actors. The Quickener aimed to take us back 700 years to muse over enigmatic, deeply spiritual themes, while all the lines were delivered in a style many people still think only works if you have your baseball cap on backwards.
But that is the spirit of hip hop. Trying things that have simply never been done before. Like when Kool Herc started to repeat breaks on old disco records or Grand Wizzard Theodore ‘scratched’ a record back and forth for the first time. Yes, they stood on the shoulders of other artists, but with these semi-plagiarised scraps, they truly created something new, bold and inspiring. The Quickener does exactly the same.
I’ll be very interested to see what this truly unique piece of art triggers into existence over the next 35 years.
The Quickener is now available to stream free of charge here:
A few years ago, I heard on the grapevine that a friend of mine, Tom Avery, had won a competition with a novel that he had written. That’s funny, I thought, I didn’t know Tom wrote. All I knew was that he was a good bloke and seemed like a very good primary school teacher. But that’s the thing about fiction writers in Christian circles isn’t it? Unless you write about Christian stuff exclusively for Christians, there are very few platforms in most churches to showcase your skill or test out your ability.
Well, it turns out that this wasn’t just a ‘pat on the back’ diversion for Tom, but the start of a new career which has been going from strength to strength ever since.
Just 5 years on, he writes children’s fiction full time to critical acclaim and has won the Diverse Voices Book Award and been nominated for the 2015 Carnegie Medal. He has just published his third novel, Not As We Know It, and so I thought it was long overdue that we caught up with him and got inside his head a little.
So, for all you closet writers out there who think that Tom’s story seems a bit like a dream come true, hopefully this will provide some encouragement and wisdom.
So, Tom…
For readers, a novel from a new author comes out of the blue, but this is seldom the case for a writer. What was your experience of writing before your first novel ‘Too Much Trouble’?
That depends what you mean by writing. If you mean putting pen to paper or fingertips to keyboard, my experience was slight. I’d never attempted a novel.
As a reader, you pick up a book by an author you know and there is an expectation of the quality of prose, originality of concept, of character. For a debut, your expectations are lowered. You step into the unknown. I might suggest that your expectations in some regards should be higher.
Most novelists will have been conspiring to write and thinking about that first tome for years, if not decades, directly or indirectly, before they chisel their ideas in stone. This was my experience. I had years of working with young people logged in the back of my head when I started writing.
Sure, an author learns their craft through experience, through the write and repeat cycle of creating and shaping, deleting and re-forming. Sure, a debut, for most, will not showcase their writing, plotting, storytelling at its polished, mature form. But a debut novel says what an author has been waiting to say for years. The ideas should be original. The voices fresh.
Having said all that, if someone asks me which book of mine they should read, I don’t recommend Too Much Trouble. I usually plump for my latest. My latest book is what I want to say now.
What do you hope to achieve through your writing?
My working life aside from writing has been in education, working in schools in London and Birmingham. Everyone is different and this truth becomes evident when you have thirty little lives squashed in a classroom. Everyone is different but children’s books are not.
Tropes of course are necessary. We want to connect story to our previous experience. We want a frame of reference where we can see Frodo Baggins in Harry Potter, James Bond in Alex Ryder. But children also want to see themselves and their lives in the books they read. Some of the great names in children’s fiction like Jacqueline Wilson and Malory Blackman have shown that children want diverse protagonists.
All of my books were borne out of a desire to write about a real child’s circumstances. My aim is never to write an ‘issues’ book but a ‘real’ book. What I want to achieve is hope spoken into the real challenges that children face.
How does your Christian faith affect your writing?
Occasionally, when Christians hear of my profession, they jump to the conclusion or make the suggestion that I write great allusive books like C.S. Lewis. But with all respect to the great don, I don’t feel called to this allegorical way of presenting Christianity.
I alluded to it above. I want to present hope. I want children to see that circumstance can be redeemed. The Christian message is that God is in the business of renewing all things. I want my books to be ones of renewal.
Lots of Christian authors, maybe especially those writing for young adults, have a tendency to become very didactic and moralistic in their writing. Do you feel this temptation and if so how do you deal with it?
I guess I don’t. Not to any great extent. I’m in the business of telling stories. Stories carry message. Stories have impact. Without setting out to preach, stories convey a world view.
I take care to write about what I feel convicted to write about but in the same way that I would not set out to write an ‘issues’ book, I don’t set out as an apologist.
On your website, you give some really helpful writing tips (here). If you could give just one piece of advice to an aspiring author, what would it be?
Keep writing.
A novel is 40,000, 50,000, 60,000 words (unless you’re George R. R. Martin). That takes a mighty long time to write – more than enough time to see the magnificent flaws in your writing, your plot, your characters.
Keep writing.
It takes perseverance to write through the time when your own writing makes you laugh it’s so bad.
Keep writing.
One day you’ll have those tens of thousands of words with a beginning, middle and end (or something like that). One day you’ll have the novel that only you could write.
It is painful but keep writing.
You’ve got a new book- Not As We Know It. What is it about and do you know what your next project will be?
Not As We Know It is a tale of mermen, Star Trek and fraternal love set in the early 80s.
Jamie and Ned are twins. They do everything together: riding their bikes, beachcombing outside their house, watching their favourite episodes of Star Trek.
But Ned is sick.
When they discover a strange creature on the beach, Jamie begins to hope that the creature might bring some miracle, and stop his brother from going where he can no longer follow.
My next project – I’ve recently moved with my family to Amsterdam and I am working on a book that takes inspiration from this – a girl and her father move to the city where they want to find a fresh start. I’ve also been writing some retellings of folk tales about giants from around the world.
You may or may not see them in bound book form.
Thank you Tom. Please keep an eye out for Tom. Buy his books and support him in any way you can. To find out more or get hold of his books, click here. Traditionally Christians have thought that influential Christians are the ones who speak to other Christians on a Sunday morning or write books to fill other Christians’ book shelves. This guy is bringing hope into the homes of the 90% who would never come to church or buy any Kingsway paperbacks. We need more Tom Averies!
I wonder how many songs have been released featuring just one man and his guitar. It’s got to be a fairly impressive number. It’s tempting to think that this simple combination has already thrown up all its possible permutations in the history of music and that the listening audience of the 21st century demands something just a little more sophisticated.
And such a view would not be unsubstantiated. Anyone who has frequented local gigs or small scale music festivals will know that when the solitary singer-songwriter wanders up to his stool armed with just his trusty acoustic, it may well be a good time to get a drink/go to the loo/go home.
However, I guess a lot depends on that ‘one man’. If, for example, he happens to have wild ginger hair, sprouting from both his scalp and chin, sport a pair of glasses with the lenses wedged into the frames by pieces of cork, and go by the name of Ross Spencer, I warn you- do not, for any reason, leave the room. Instead, find a decent spot and prepare yourself for to be utterly entranced by one of the most immersive and powerful live performances you’ll ever experience.
Ross is an incredible talent who has already produced one of my all time favourite albums (Ego Mute) and has just released a new 3 track EP, featuring title track ‘Fallujah’ (performed at SputnikLive last year, see the above video).
We caught up with him and submitted him to the Sputnik interrogation. I’ve split it in two to help those of you with limited attention spans- part 1 today and part 2 next time. Have a read and then go and find out what I’m on about by buying his new EP (here)
Who are you and why do you make music?
I am D Ross Spencer (secret Dave, always been called Ross), and I’ve been writing and performing my own songs since my late teens. Other than that I like to skateboard, draw weird cryptic patterns, and look at the hidden geometry in trees (note to self, stop showing off).
Why music? I guess it helps me connect with my feelings, it’s a wonderful balm for the soul, and it’s like an exploration, diving in caves without a map.
Also, I just read an excerpt from an essay by John Fowles which explains Prof. Gilbert J. Rose’s proposition that some children retain a memory of the transition from an infant who identifies with the mother, to a singular entity and the dawning of a reality in which they are in some sense, alone. It reminds me of our separation from perfect unity and continual community with God. Anyway, what he goes on to say is that these children go on to be artists, in an attempt to recreate that state of unity, of oneness, and in a way going back to that place on behalf of others.
Your lyrics are consistently fantastic, seeming at once intensely personal yet also readily relevant to me, as a listener. How do you usually write lyrics? Do you have a usual method or way of writing or is it more spontaneous?
My favourite way to write is on the spur of the moment, when I jam one out for an audience or with friends, but most of those songs, ‘Rhubarb’ being an exception, are only there for the moment and can’t be retrieved. So when I compose by myself I let the music develop to a point where I feel moved to jump in, till I’m ‘feelin’ it’ as they say in street vernacular (do they still say that?) Then I see where The Spirit leads me.
The words are often connected to pictures and moods in my head, which is how I then remember them, replaying the film so to speak, and reliving feelings.
I don’t have much confidence that I can communicate my thoughts directly in a way that people won’t find patronising or boring, or that I really have anything of much importance to say that hasn’t already been said, so I rely on vagaries, collage, and unstructured thoughts and songs.
I find the themes of small animals, a sense of wonder and worship, and a pining for resolution and justice coming back again and again. Fruit and veg seem to often crop up in my freestyling as well, along with fierce animal alliances planning rebellious raids with the aid of hot air balloons. There’s a head film still in development, not sure how that one ends yet. Plenty of angry badgers and hedgehogs though, for sure.
Sputnik will keep everyone informed as to when Ross’ angry badger film is being released! We’ll be back with part 2 of the interview early next week.
Rating system: I consider 3 aspects of the film: the script, the whole production and finally how strongly the film impacted me and provoked powerful ideas and intense conversation. In each category I give marks out of 10.
