Our current sermon series, Ruth: a refugee’s story of redemption, explores how the hand of God works through ordinary people to achieve His glorious plans. In this blog post, artist Sally Conwell explains her inspiration for the sermon series artwork.
It was an honour to sit and think over a pair of eyes that might belong to Ruth.
The story of Ruth is incredible—she is a woman of great faith and a character in the Bible that I have always greatly admired. This has been particularly true growing up as a young woman and during seasons of suffering.
I wanted to use this opportunity to explore in depth who Ruth was. What I find most intriguing about her is that she is a character of great contrast.
A woman of sorrow, and yet joy. She experiences great loss, and yet peace. She is shown a hopeless future, and yet is filled with hope. She is handed uncertainty, and yet meets it with faith. She is subject to the cultural norms of her time that see women as unfit to be self-sufficient, and yet she is brave, courageous and unrelenting. It appears at first as though she is bound by the circumstances in her life, and yet she is free. Ruth was free indeed.
I wanted to draw how these contrasts miraculously co-exist within Ruth.
Rachel Curl did an amazing job at conveying this again through her beautiful hand written text and torn texture overlay. There is strength, boldness and brokenness found in the text of Ruth’s name.
Ruth lived a hard life, and yet moved freely to the sound of God’s call. This is a woman who truly believed in a sovereign and powerful God.
About the Artist
First exhibiting at the age of 18, Sally Conwell had completed two artist residencies in France before the age of 22, completed studies in Fine Arts (COFA/UNSW) and launched a bizarre range of greeting cards that make very little sense, under the name Sit Still Sally. She can’t actually sit still, and each work seems to differ greatly from the last.
Her work explores the transient nature of man; with all the oddities of life and pockets of joy found inbetween. Sally describes her works as a ‘progressive working out of ideas’ found in her readings and love for ontology, philosophy, poetry and other vague, inconclusive facts & fictions—the writings of Emmanual Levinas (The Face Theory), Gerard Hopkins (Inscape Theory), Anais Nin, Emily Dickinson, J.R.R. Tolkien, and C.S. Lewis have been particularly influential.
Today, Sally works from and runs ‘Deadfern Studios’ in Sydney’s inner west.
http://www.sallyannconwell.com