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Hamilton Made Whole - Community Art Project
This past summer the New City Arts Team organized a fun, creative and collaborative community art project. They invited anyone aged 14 and up, who was interested in participating, to create a small painting - a copy of a reference image that the team provided. They were not shown the other reference images and they were not shown the larger image that their specific reference image was taken from. Each participant was given an 8” X 8” panel to create their work on. Once all the panels were complete and submitted they were mounted to yet another 4' X 8' panel, framed and hung in New City's front lobby. The final piece was unveiled during Supercrawl and the result was amazing!
65 artists participated in painting the 72 panels required for the mural.
I was honoured to contribute several panels to this project.
The project is all part of the mission and vision of New City Church in Hamilton - "To see God renew all things by being a community of the Spirit in the heart of the city, announcing the gospel of Jesus Christ."
The mural project demonstrates that despite our differences and diversity we can all contribute something meaningful to the bigger work God is calling us to here. A mosaic, like a church (and like a city), is a beautiful picture of individual and unique pieces making up an integrated whole. We see differently. We express differently. Yet together we're commissioned to tell a story together.
It was interesting to see these differences come out in each piece despite the artists being given the same instructions. Like handwriting, our individual panels reveal something about us even when we’re describing the same thing. We focus or fixate on different things, we choose to work in different mediums, we have different skill levels and have different aesthetic leanings. Though we all work towards the same goal, our uniqueness (including strengths and weaknesses) is never absent. What a picture of community!
Many expressed that it was harder than they thought. While initially willing to participate some quickly realized, "Wow!, this is really hard." Again this is a picture of what it's like to participate in our vision/mission. A vision sounds great and we can be quick to volunteer only to find that perhaps we’re not as good at something as we thought. Or the task is bigger than we thought. Perhaps we find ourselves comparing ourselves to others, and we feel vulnerable and outside of our comfort zone(s).
Breaking the bigger task into smaller pieces and asking more people to help, taking care to match levels of difficulty and the skill levels participants is an approach that can be taken to accomplish any mission.
Some of us struggled to paint what we saw when we weren’t sure what we were looking at. Some of us struggled to paint something the way it appeared in our reference picture vs: what we thought the thing should look like ie: "Is that a blue shape or is it a tree?" Some simplified the shapes in front of them and missed or ignored some of the finer details. Some got caught up in the minute details and missed the bigger shapes. All of us were painting a small piece without knowing how it fit into the bigger picture. Working on a larger mission can feel like that sometimes too. Is what I’m doing part of something bigger? Does what I’m doing fit anywhere? Will anyone notice if I stopped?
Stepping back is important from time to time to assess what we’re doing. Does this fit? Does this line up with what others are doing? Diving in and focussing on our specific area is also important to ensure the accuracy of our work. We need both!
I was honoured to participate in this project and I was super impressed with how it turned out.
