I, Lord design session 3: our stained glass window
It's taken me a little longer to write the post this week because honestly, I haven't known how to do justice to what happened in the space. We were honoured to be joined by special guest Rosie Dawson: a journalist, documentary maker and radio producer specialising in religious affairs. Talking to her, hearing the rest of the group speak about what we have been doing, and hearing her feed back on what she was seeing in the context of her more than 20 years of professional experience and her allyship with survivors of faith abuse, it became clear just how overdue this interfaith survivor space is. I think it landed for all of us just how significant and vital this project is.
Rosie is putting together an audio documentary from our interviews as we speak, which will air on the Shiloh Podcast. We'll be sure to let you know when it's out! In the meantime, take a look at the previous episodes: some really nuanced, vital discussions to be found.
In the session, we went back to the wood and glass miniatures we had been making the week before, and explored how we might like to layer them together into a collage to represent our work together. We played around with different prompts, taken from our descriptions of spiritual safety from our very first week:
True Self
Feelings You Don't Understand
Delighted In
Journey Against Evil
We then listened to an extract from the play, in which a perpetrator is describing a stained glass window from his perspective. The group was given a few minutes to write, draw, or in other ways express their responses to the image he describes, followed by a discussion on how something so pure can be read as something so damaging.
Stained glass children
I, Me
Quiet/
Secrets
So how would we reflect the image needed to inspire this reading, while imbuing it with the safety, hope and positive spirituality we were finding together?
I won't struggle to find a way to describe what happened next, but simply let the pictures do the talking.
This image was borne of a discussed love for religious/spiritual imagery that you could look at for hours and keep finding different things in it - so I won't tell you what the group intended it to be. I look at it now and it fills me with so much hope that I don't quite know what to do with it. We're all so excited to see it take pride of place in the production.
That's the end of our visual design explorations: our final two sessions will be dedicated to sound and music. It's going so fast, but every second is being relished and every creation is a revelation.
Only 10 days left to take advantage of the early bird ticket offer: book now!
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