Final Act

It seems crazy that the first semester of our senior year has already drawn to a close. There were a lot of challenges, but there were a lot of amazing blessings as well. It has been an eventful chapter of my life to say the least. In any case, it is almost time to move to the next stage. I'm nervous about what the next semester may hold, but I'm excited as well. I'm sure there will be many wonderful opportunities, and I hope to make the most of them!

My act of faith related to some of the challenges I have faced recently, particularly when it comes to letting go and trusting God. I like to be in control of what is going on around me, and it distresses me when situations arise that feel impossible for me to fix. It's terrifying to have to move through difficult events when you are uncertain of what the outcome will be. Though these feelings had been surrounding me for much of the semester, I hadn't taken much time to process them and seek God's perspective. This sparked the idea for creating a work of art based on trusting God and using the art as a form of meditation. I had purchased some printing linoleum to use for my senior thesis class, so I decided to create a print for my act of faith. When preparing a print, I usually spend a great deal of time sketching out the piece I am going to be creating, then transferring the sketched image onto the linoleum. I then trace the image with a sharpie, since the thick and dark sharpie lines give me a better idea of what the final print will look like.

Linoleum being carved. Flipped this way, the image looks like a woman singing or yelling.

Instead of doing all the normal preparations, I surrendered my preference for pre-planning my creative works, and just started carving, keeping my thoughts on God rather than the results I hoped to achieve. Carving without a pre-planned image helped me to reflect on how I needed to trust God with the unknown parts of my life, and that even if things didn't turn out in a way I liked, that didn't stop them from being beneficial or beautiful.

Flipped this way, the image looks like a man with slightly hunched shoulders and a worried expression

After getting over my initial feelings of nervousness and reluctance to carve randomly on something I had spent good money on, I was able to relax into the process. Releasing myself from the expectation of perfection allowed me to act on a whim and pursue whatever lines made me happy. In the end, I found an image of two faces beginning to develop, and I kept adding to them to see what would happen. The print I created became something like the Rorschach Ink Blots, images that one could look at and interpret in different ways to discover things about how she thinks. The faces that I see in the print are of a young woman and an old man. The old man is bearded and looking away, perhaps with worry or concern, and his shoulders seem slightly hunched. The young woman, which can be seen if you flip the picture of the man upside-down, has flying hair and an open mouth. She seems to be singing or perhaps yelling, and the sounds she is making vibrate in lines away from her. When I look at these images, I see hardship and burden connected to movement and freedom. There is both sorrow and determination present, and both are valid. I think this project was an important step forward in my attempts to work through inner turmoil and remember how essential it is to trust God. Even if things do not work out as I want them to, it does not mean things did not work out as they should have. It is okay for things to be uncertain.

Final Print