Why ‘Desert Files’?

 The Desert is the home of the Abrahamic religions – Jewish, Christian, Muslim. Hermits of the early Christian Church – the ‘Desert Fathers and Mothers’ – took a literal journey into the deserts of Egypt and the Near East – to explore the hidden recesses of the personality, its conditioning, and through that, interrogation of the culture(s) producing them. Western depth-psychology is born.

Lent is a time for self-reflection. The reflections tend in the direction of a self-excavation, examining the fault-lines, debris and deep structures of the psyche. Taken far enough they become ‘diggings’ of the person, and its cultural formations. The journey is into the ‘desert’ of our society and our selves. 

Why the Seven Last Sayings?

The Seven Last Sayings is a harmonisation across the four canonical Gospels, of the closing statements of Jesus before his death. Assimilated into the consciousness of the person working with them, the Sayings become the voice of some of the deepest expressions of human experience - the human being at its outer limits.  The voice of the suffering Christ is representative: the voice of all suffering, all confrontation with darkness, distortion and death.

For those contemplating the Sayings through Lent, the journey is one beneath the ordinary self we live with into deeper levels of being, shared with others, and often only accessed in moments of trauma or pain. The Sayings are a ticket into the unvisited territories of the self, the ‘desert’ in the psyche.
A place, for most of us, without coordinates. The exhibition echoes that disorientation by presenting the Sayings out of their narrative order. The viewer navigates their own way through the pieces. Cut loose from narrative ties, each Saying is at once a dislocation from the known ‘map’ (the Gospels) and an echo of our own position in a culture loosened from its larger stories and dominated by the sound-bite.

Process

Choose one of the last 7 things that Jesus said on the cross, using this as starting point for your creative process.

Then use the next six weeks of Lent to create something, using the weekly online prayer meditations, daily blogging from others on the journey and an artists workshop or two to spark ideas, contemplation, thoughts, discussion.

All culminating in the Desert Files exhibition during Easter Weekend, where the Cityside community share the creative output of their Desert Files journeys.

Desert Files: Artist Workshops

Sandra Atkins facilitated workshops for people doing a Desert Files art process for Lent.

The first workshop was held at 1 o'clock in the pm on Saturday 1 March. A transcription of events is available for the curious.

You can click the logo above to return to the desert files homepage