Week 3 - Art as a Medium of Spirituality

This week we were fortunate enough to go on an excursion to the UQ Art Museum to see the work of Linde Ivimey. Linde's art at fist glance is very full on. However, once the story behind it all is explained, it permeates a strong sense of spirituality. Through her Catholic upbringing as a child, Linde began to explore the stories of the ordinary saints and gradually found herself immersed in the stories of some of the more extra-ordinary ones (Ivimey 2012). Not only are a number of Linde's works religious in the sense of depicting particular saints, but all of her works have a sense of spirituality. This is evident through personal trauma and tribulations she has faced over the course of her life, including divorce and health problems, which she evokes through her art. She displays her relationship between art and religion in a special way. This is predominantly done through the interesting implements she uses in her artwork, namely: bones. 

My own interpretation of Lindey's use of bone. Left: human teeth and sheep bones. Right: natural cow bone. Bottom: chicken necks in chainmail arrangement

At first, this is quite a dark and disturbing concept. Linde describes it as "an externalization of what's inside" us naturally (Ivimey 2012). With this thought, it is easier to understand where she is coming from. A few of her works, in particular, use chicken neck bones in the form of chainmail. Linde uses this as a way of representing strength in her work through self portraits using the chainmail (Ivimey 2012). The biological approach to her art is appealing coming from a science background where these materials would usually be seen in laboratories as specimens. Here, Linde gives them a second life in a creative and spiritual way. The intimate details on the bones like stress fractures and their own quirky dents portrays the experiences the animals/humans endured as Linde aims to do with her art. Art is Linde's life, love and has become her own 'secular' form of belief (Anderson 2012).

References: 

Linde Ivimey UQ 1280x720. 2012. Retrieved March 16, 2013.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfvD45OVqgk

Anderson JA. 2012. The (In)visibility of Theology in Contemporary Art Criticism. http://open.biola.edu/resources/the-in-visibility-of-theology-in-contemporary-art-criticism?collection=art-and-faith