Into your hands I commit my to-do list

Clay, acrylic sheeting, LED lights
80cm high x 80 cm diameter
 
This piece is about meeting God in the everydayness of life, in the quotidian rituals of an at-home-parent.
My cairn of prayer rocks was built among the tasks which take up most of my time, energy, focus and creativity.  Each stone represents an intentional turning towards God, and the hope that thin places can occur in the mundane, the familiar, the ordinary, and routine too.

Selected photos

Kirsten's talk from the Opening Night. Artists Talk About Their Work.
Wednesday 19 March 2008, 7:00-8:30pm, in the Gallery Space.

Facilitated by Sandra Atkins.

Kirsten: I chose the saying 'Into your hands I commit my spirit' because it is what I say as I being a time of Centering Prayer. When I chose to put my name down for this Saying, back in November [2007], I intended to use the Lenten season to make Centering Prayer a daily practice.
    Centering Prayer is based on a gesture of surrender, of letting go. Similar to Mark, in my art work, I was initially exploring the idea that in letting go, something new could be crated. As each rock, a metaphor for a thought that is let go, is placed, it becomes part of something new, a spiritual marker or cairn.
    Mark Prins and I planned out pieces as companions to each other - exploring the building up of something in the process of letting go of something. However, the season of Lent has been a fiendishly busy time for me, and I'm afraid the daily Centering Prayer was sadly sporadic. The making of the 46 prayer rocks, one for each day of Lent, became entangled with my busyness, with the changes I've faced with my eldest daughter. She turned five on the 6th of February, the first day of Lent. And three weeks later, after we'd built up to it, she started school. And that's been a time of huge transition for all of us. Particularly for me! [laughter]
    So, I decided that I needed to work with what I had. Instead of the long stretches of peace and quiet and contemplation to connect with things spiritual that I had hoped for, I was immersed in the busyness of my to-do lists.
    I am a list person. I'm a ' One'. Even when I don't write them down, the interior of my head still looks like thousands of sub-groupings of to-do lists. It was a little scary seeing them collected and written down for this artwork,and knowing that I could have covered another five or so large boards with them without any effort whatsoever.
    My days as a parent - I'm an at-home parent - are filled with multitudes of small tasks, most of which need to be repeated many times and every day, and many of which are the sort of job that is only noticed if you haven't done it. I have been thinking on how each of these small things, over time, can build to make a larger and valuable whole, much like the mounds of stones brought one by one by pilgrims to sites of special significance, over time, they make places of exquisite beauty. Each stone in a prayer mound is small and insignificant in itself. As each stone is laid, there isn't a picture of what the whole will look like. But each stone is a part of the whole. Pondering this had given me a sense of value in the mundane.
    Marcus Borg, in his book The Heart of Christianity, writes about what the calls 'thin places.' These are experiences or places "where the veil momentarily lifts, and we behold God, experience the one in whom we live, all around us and within us." I wanted to explore through my art how to notice the thin places that might occur as part of the daily tasks and rituals of parenting. So I've built my cairn of prayer rocks on top of the to-do lists that consume my days.
    In this art work, there are lots of rocks and parts of the lists that aren't visible to the viewer, but they're needed to hold up the ones on the outside and top. This mirrors the way lots of the tasks I do also seem to be invisible. Unless they're not done.
    The koru represents new life and new beginnings - and those that know me, know that I use a lot of koru, and have a lot of koru around. They represent growth, strength, peace, tranquillity and spirituality. I've used a type of koru where the larger swirl protects a smaller off-shoot. This design represents nurturing and intergenerational relationships in Maori art.  The list items on my plinth are shaped by the koru in the same way that the nurturing tasks they represent are necessary because of the nurturing role I have undertaken.
    There is a Joy Cowley  poem - Mark hates Joy Cowley, but I'm going to say it anyway! [laughter] - which begins - it's my only poem book! [laughter]:
    "God of washing, God of unmade beds,
    God of dented saucepans and worn-out brooms,
    your presence in the most ordinary things
    often takes me by surprise."
    It's been nice to make a conscious effort to try and notice God occasionally this Lent, while I wait endlessly next to the potty [laughter] or as I scrape the porridge from underneath the table [laughter].
    I have been experimenting with spiritual practices that I can fit into my parenting role, rather than having these lovely long retreats - which I hope will happen one day. One that I've found particularly useful is that of thinking of five things that I'm grateful for, each day. I have found a space for this as I take my youngest daughter for a pre-sleep stroll in the sunset, and her head is nestling into my neck and her body warm against mine. It's an easy time to feel gratitude.
    Next year, for Lent, I am considering fasting from to-do lists . . .
[laughter]

Sandra: As a list maker, to which I can relate, has it left you with something to go on with for being inspired?

Kirsten: I hope so, I’m still in the middle of the busyness of actually completing the artwork, and having a child that vomited on me in St. Luke’s today, of those sorts of things, and still sort of only just got past the fact of running down to school every hour and a half. So my moments are small but I’m hoping that those moments can be used. 

Sandra: And those of us who, and I know there are a few looking at the number of children here, who relate to the mundane, and the everydayness and finding the sacred in it, thank you! Before we move on, because this was a companion piece, Mark, I might just ask you what it has left with you in that process of sifting through, the keeping and holding, and one of the things that you might hold on to.

Mark Prins: I’ve become a lot more conscious about holding on to things and initially it was physical possessions. It was nice to have the ability think about the things that I do and the things that I do everyday and it comes back to those quotidian rituals again, but also practices that we do, it's nice to stop and think about them how they build up your character. To realize that you do have the ability to actually change them in response.