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Monday, October 31, 2011

Compelled to Rescue



I was recently invited to be part of a collaborative journal project. There are 5 of us artists from around the US who will be trading art journals for a year in a circuit. We each chose our own format and theme. Then, at the end of the year, we will each get our original journals back with everyone's artistic contributions in them.

My theme is grace. I choose to use recycled CDs as my format and my 'journal' is a fabric case I made to carry the finished CDs.

When I was working on this piece, I was doing some research on the chinese character for grace (which you can see in the piece). While searching, I found this description:

“Why is a mature man confined in a cell or enclosure? The answer forms the character
(the top box part of the character) which means ‘cause’ or ‘reason.’ The sight of such a confined man may excite pity in the heart (the bottom part of the character), and if this feeling leads one to liberate him, that is grace - the result of tempering reason with sentiment.”

I was struck by this description of grace. It gave me a richer picture of God’s grace to me: that He saw me confined in my cell and was moved. He was compelled to rescue me.

Then He did.