Perhaps the World Ends Here: Art and Table

Jill Carattini

This article accompanies the Work of Our Hands section of this edition, which is presented online as an exhibition in Call to Worship‘s ASSEMBLE gallery.

View the exhibition here.

The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.” So begins one of Joy Harjo’s most notable poems.¹ Its title borrowed for the name of the exhibition in this issue, signals clearly that there will be more than living that happens at this table. Yet somehow also, held on these opposite legs, the beginnings and endings are all part of the meal we must eat to live. 

We have given birth on this table, and have prepared our parents for burial here. 

At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse. We
give thanks.

Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.

-Joy Harjo “Perhaps the World Ends Here”

 

In word and image, the former poet laurate constructs, presents, and invites us to a table, seating us as guests alongside tensions and between categories we don’t often place together, like company we try to keep apart at dinner parties. She has prepared a room and an invitation full of possibilities for us. We sit down with her at the table, bringing our own stories to share, passing our own images of past and present.  

What Harjo creates with metaphor and hospitality, artists do instinctively. They place tables in our midst, building legs out of notions that upend the sturdy categories many use to make sense of the world, showing us how often we are content to dine with the imaginations of reductionists. They offer us meeting spaces to sit with contrasts, to sit with ourselves, to sit with others, a central space to reimagine together. The tables they create can be at once centrifugal and centripetal, broadening and narrowing, making the mundane strange, inviting matters of life and the matters of death to sit down and share a cup of coffee. 

These tables have become a guiding symbol for me, my own legs planted in distinct spaces. I am a minister of Word and Sacrament. I am also a curator. In each setting, the gift of the table is the gift of more. 

In a world that offers steady rations of cynicism and outrage, conflated morsels of truth served along inhospitable divides, the table is a space that nourishes with hopeful correctives, feeding weary imaginations with the suggestion that there is both room and reason to counter-imagine. Resisting tendencies to reduce and flatten visions of life, artists invite us to look again, to commune with the notion that there might be more to see—indeed, that there might always be more to see.

The eucharistic table surely feeds us with similar promise. That Christ left us with a meal to remember him is truly as layered as the work of an artist, for the Eucharist is an invitation to return again and again to a faith with aesthetic sensibilities, a faith that resists reductive divisions of body and spirit, the kingdom of heaven and the reality of earth. Jesus was always eating at tables that disrupted settled theologies and social stratifications; the human condition was not flattened or dismissed at his tables but on full display. There is always more to taste and see at the eucharistic table because Christ himself is the host. His broken and resurrected body is placed in our hands is inexhaustible beauty, incomprehensible mystery, a gift for sorrowing creatures. There is space at this table for every sorrow, every tension, and every song in life and in death.

The gift of tables is the gift of more. I am convinced that our role as the church, particularly in an age of diminishing imaginations, is to be ambassadors of this abundant hospitality of Christ. In this, any table we share that opens us to mystery, invites communion with friends and strangers of many times and places, offers safety or the possibility of wholeness, re-members what is broken, or re-stories what might need a better story or song, is indeed a table that offers something more real than what lies outside in the dark. To advocate for artists is to advocate for such tables. 

The eight artists whose work accompanies the pages of this journal edition bring further substance and color to my point. Their work invites us to sit and linger on the tensions between life and death, senses attuned with uncommon curiosity in the company of so much more than we brought into this space.

While the immense themes among these artists—grief and story, memory and origin, absence and presence—certainly counter temptations to flatten conceptions of our humanity, it is worth noting that many of the works in this exhibit also happen to be massive in form. Matthew Doll’s Chorus and Antonio Darden’s S Tenebris tower as tables crying out to the masses, holding the love and loss of centuries in present songs meant to be shared. Mary Hallam Pearse’s Full Bloom, Pearse and Peragine’s collaborative Steered by Falling Stars, and the emerging figures of Harry Ally’s paintings are all larger-than-human explorations of the human condition.

While individual works are rich with layers of meaning, something emerges from the exhibition as a whole that resembles the surprising conversations that may happen around a table. The company is profound where two or more are gathered. Intentional and surprising connections between the work of different artists demonstrate the capacity of art to generate new dimensions of meaning. 

For instance, flowers, real and preserved, plastic and artificial, discarded, unearthed, and decaying, appear in more than a few of the works. The prophet Isaiah’s description of our lives as fading flora comes to mind. Human experience becomes a layered wilderness, beautiful and perilous, with each intersecting vine. Mary Hallam Pearse’s suspended and substantial work Full Bloom creates flowers from lead, recognizing flowers as markers of mourning and devotion, fillers of voids, and declarations of love while considering the dark and troubling history of lead as a material. 

In Steered by Falling Stars, Pearse and Joseph Peragine collaborate to reference both figurative and literal themes. A seven-foot skull, once installed to look out over the city of Atlanta, is crafted entirely from discarded plastic flowers gathered from cemeteries across Georgia and from corsages and boutonnieres, discarded markers of both mourning and merriment. 

Antonio Darden’s S Tenebris is a searing monument of personal grief. The invitation to join him in it immediately feels as immense as the shrouded sculpture that fills the room. S Tenebris is a life-size recreation of the Chevrolet S 10 pickup truck the artist was given after the sudden passing of his father, which happened just six months after a Georgia state patrol officer made a decision that took his brother’s life. “There is a grief that comes and goes,” writes Darden. “There is also the kind that just sits on your chest and compresses your sternum. Sometimes we go to dark places.” S Tenebris places us at a table with the grief-stricken artist himself. Layers of social and political injustice are not lost in this space; the silence is far from empty. But in shrouded silence we sit, attuned to our common flesh and blood.

Artist Lanecia Rouse works toward a similar hope, offering her grief as a story that opens others up to engaging their own. There is no word in the English language to describe the woman who has lost a child, no word to mark the identity held in that grief. Yet Rouse continues to delve into the semantic gaps with an identity that pushes against the notions of presence and absence. Her work takes form in collages of fabric and paint, discarded and found words. Her identity as the mother of an absent child, the presence of a daughter lost, and stories told and untold, are all held in the balance. In so doing, Rouse offers a meeting space remarkably akin to the mystery Christ offers at the table of the Eucharist, his broken body a gift that re-members and re-stories, his absence a real and nurturing presence, his table mercifully able to hold both.

Similar theological chords resonate in the work of Harry Ally, despite his friendly insistence of non-religious existentialism. When I first asked Ally about his decades of work as a figurative artist, he admitted that the question he holds over each work again and again is both personal and unoriginal. “I am always asking,” he said, “is there someone there or is there no one?” Harry’s figures are unearthed, a labored search into the unknown with pigments and paint, tar and fabric, bonding agents and clays dug from Georgia soil. Limbs materialize (or de-materialize) like fading, sacred flora in a decaying world of hearts and bodies. Yet his figures do not appear before us with a tentative or mocking existence; each one is a presence that seems to come alongside our own, giving a sense of a shared storyline, a figure with whom we might ask the questions we are loath to ask alone: Who am I? Where did we come from? Where are we going?  

Like Ally, Anna Yearwood employs the labored work of excavation in her own pursuit of origin and meaning. Memory & Understanding, a performative exploration of memories of home, began as an initial act of carving an image of her childhood home into a copper plate, followed by a repeated retracing of the plate lines and an internal digging further and further into the memories it held. At various points in the material process, an edition was printed, each proof marking a stage of remembrance. With each subsequent excavation, the more physically challenging it became to carve the plate, the more labored the remembering became. The carved lines began to converge in a way that marred and nearly disappeared the home. In the process of creating the work, Yearwood realized she didn’t want to destroy the image, but to come to an understanding. In near ashes of memory, wrestling with the lines between creating and destroying, Yearwood herself was startled within her own artistic process, and new images and—memories—of home were recreated. 

God promises to bring us to tables in the presence of our enemies, mercifully; at times the enemy is us. But we are far from alone. Art at its best slows down racing minds and preoccupied bodies, leaving viewers more present, engaging us in dialogue with ourselves, with the object, with the artist, with what the artist has found in the process of making—and sometimes with a mysterious other. The harried heart is far too willing to cooperate with its own death. We must, as Mary Oliver says, refuse all cooperation. The work of each of these artists leaves us with the suspicion of real presence at the tables they have set, a presence that evokes in us a similar cry for resistance.

Craig Hawkins explores questions of that shared space at actual tables, holding tensions within the layered symbol itself—icon of reconciliation, utilitarian surface, barrier, or bridge. The presence and purpose of the table shapes the space we share as much as the people who join us at the table and the objects we bring to it. Something is always shared at table. Hawkins’s work is a longing for a shared wholeness, despite the complicated pieces we bring.

The work of Matthew Doll compounds that prayer. The artist describes tensions at the very surface of the painting which become a meeting point, a table created in synthesis and compression. Despite a diverse range of subject matter, Doll considers each of the works included in this exhibit as landscapes—“landscapes that are prayers which hold open the lines of communication across wastelands, across what we simply cannot know, across spaces I often cannot reach, people I cannot touch.” 

“We can reach out, though,” he concludes. 

What Doll means by this, in fact, can only be accounted for by the table. For Doll and for each of the artists in this exhibition, the table is a place that can and should hold wholeness even as it can and should hold our many layers of grief, histories of injustice, human wounds, and absences so great they reveal themselves as presences. At the table, stories can be re-told, a more beautiful song learned, bodies lost and broken re-membered, and life made new even in death.

Doll’s Holy Family exists in such a legacy. It is a recasting of a medieval fresco that tells the story of a Jewish boy who receives the Eucharist, a story intending to show the eucharistic table as the site of miracle. The boy is thrown into the furnace by his enraged father only to be found alive, unharmed and embraced, by his mother. Holding the tragic reality of recurring persecution and suffering across history, Doll brings even the fresco’s artist to the table. “I would love to imagine that even the original artist understood that the family embracing their child was the point and not the utility of the miracle.” The center of the story, the center of all stories, in Doll’s retelling, becomes the embrace, the architecture of refuge for this child—as much as for all of us. Doll sets a vast table, setting everything that is good about our human condition alongside everything that is not quite there yet. Its title, Holy Family, sets this prayer which holds open the lines of communication across wastelands within the refuge of Trinitarian love and declarations of our belovedness. It is this communion that is the site of miracle. 

May the church be such a refuge and the table a place of that very embrace. 

And may the artists who build tables among us be nourished by our advocacy for their work. Art is indeed a needed form of resistance, but it is a hospitable resistance. Art creates space at tables we haven’t considered, suggests meals we haven’t believed we were hungry for, and offers the possibility of communing, if only for a moment, with the people and parts of ourselves we have kept in the dark. At these tables, we find the gift of more and a glimpse of the giver. 

Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, after we have learned to laugh and weep with every sense of what it means to be human, eating and drinking in the uncontainable love and hospitality of a host who appears in the breaking of bread and welcomes us home.

Note

1. Joy Harjo,  “Perhaps the World Ends Here,” The Woman Who Fell from the Sky: Poems (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994).