Sun, November 6, 2022 – Fri, January 20, 2023
ST. PAUL’S MONASTERY ART GALLERY
2675 Benet Road
St. Paul, Minnesota
Artist’s Statement
Nature’s cycle of the seasons invites us into deep wisdom to honor the earth and its sacred story. We live in what we might call an age of forgetting. We have forgotten who we are in relation and connection to everything else: the creatures, the plants, the mountains, the forests, the oceans, one another, and even ourselves.
In this series of paintings, we explore this boundary of relation as the edge or margin where things connect and find new beginnings. While our paintings are a study of edges, boundaries, and contrasts coming together, our continuing narrative inspiration is about bearing tension. The boundaries and edges are not divisions but the places that hold tension and allow something new to rise from the struggle. For us, tension is a place where we sense the breath of Spirit moving and creating within and through each of us. As our paintings progressed, we realized that part of what we were painting was the aftermath of the forest fire we experienced in 2015.The edges of the Wolverine fire contained immense destructive power, but also set the table for the re-birthing of the forest and the beauty that followed. Living on this wilderness boundary, and in that tension, we have born witness to the earth’s resurrection.
Our Soul Totems are a reflection on our time living in the remote wilderness. We responded to the beauty of the tree and its story left after the Wolverine Fire. As we are faced with the reality of climate change, the web of all life, and its impact on our earth home, we continue to form many questions. What shall we do now? How can we protect the most vulnerable of our fellow humans from prejudice and violence? How can we preserve the Earth and its creatures from devastation? How can we restore kindness and advocate for truth-telling and care for our earth?” Whatever happens next, the cultural conversation about nature will require us to come together with our earth community to face what lies ahead. We offer our reflections as prayers for wholeness.
– CHUCK HOFFMAN + PEG CARLSON-HOFFMAN
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