Faith Hampton

This series began with images of various embraces around Vienna, each with their own story. I buried that embrace under a plant, letting the plant’s leaves and buds blossom out from that central image into the outer squares, invading the plain brown paper.

It started as an idea and a wish we discussed in my women’s prayer group at the beginning of 2024, at the end of another gray winter’s day in Vienna. We had taken the time to express a prayer for ourselves and also a prayer for our city - how we wished it would develop. One of the sentiments repeated by several was the desire to see less loneliness and less infectious crankiness around town - a change in the casual way people grouse and grunt at each other. And, appropriately, it grew from there.

For life to generate, it must begin with some form of embrace or hospitality, the welcoming of the approach of the other. The act of sex and procreation itself requires an internal “yes” before it becomes a generative reality externally. Saying yes to life, to embrace, to the responsibility and risk that it can entail, is a beautiful, brave and costly thing.​

In my own current process of adoption, my husband and I are required to say “yes” over and over again to a risk, moving toward a child, hoping that child will also say yes to us. I’ve been examining the concept of procreation and motherhood through the concept of biological embrace and spiritual “yes,” working through my own anxieties and hesitations in the stories of the people hidden and revealed in these images. They are buried under the hopeful promise of their blooming plants of “yes,” that resulted or are resulting as they open themselves to embrace, some in extremely challenging and painful situations. ​

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To say yes to something that will require so much, to overcome the hesitations and doubts about the outcome, requires holding on to some sort of vision - a reason to risk. The latter works in this series deal with the idea of holding onto a vision beyond the pain of the moment - the labor, the physical pain, the giving up of oneself to embrace the other, and what life can come out of that embracing.​

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In this series, I wrestle with the knowledge that saying yes to life in this way, or yes in any meaningful relationship, involves embroiling myself in a tangle of requirements.​

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This idea of embracing personhood resonates in my spiritual life. In contrast to an energy or force, I believe in a personal, interventionist God, and I also find more comfort in this concept; only a person has purpose and memory, and can love another person fully. I can love and be loved, know and be known, only by another personal being. A force asks nothing, but also gives no love. I risk nothing, but I gain as much as I risk.​

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Embrace of another person, saying "yes" to life is the beginning of cost and risk and messiness, but also the beginning of life and growth. This series is an attempt to overcome my own fear and resistance to this generative process, and to hope for generative relationship.

This series began with a layering together of various stories, when my friend saw someone kick a pigeon. She was feeling low because she had heard some horrible news reports on the way to meet me; at a cafe, she saw a hurt pigeon limping around the courtyard. As she watched, she witnessed someone kicking at the wounded pigeon, with no purpose but casual meanness.

The next time I was in the studio, I sat, sorting through old photos and ephemera that my friend David had sent me, thinking about the events of the week. A friend in an uncertain asylum situation had been raped, and nobody cared about her or the baby that resulted from the attack. Another friend had found out that their unborn baby would most likely not survive the pregnancy. I sorted through the images in front of me and through the images in my mind. Several of the photos were of the same person: a baby, in several stages of life; a schoolgirl’s yearly photographs; a man, first young, then older, with a woman, and crouched over a desk in middle age. Amid all the other tragedies, it seemed cruel that these people, once loved and cherished and seen, were to disappear. Like my friend’s baby, who would live and die with only two people likely to remember his name.

As I thought about these things and the wounded pigeon, this quote from the gospel of Matthew came to mind: “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care. And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. So don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.”

Amid that litany of sad images and my own inability to fully engage with the overwhelming level of sorrow of the week, I felt comforted that somebody did care about that pigeon, and those babies, and that assaulted woman, and that baby in the old photos, and that dog family. Someone other than the people who loved them and saved those photos. These also disappeared like leaves after the changing seasons. Someone other than me, someone able to hold all those thoughts and feelings and facts and details and memories. I know that each of these lives does matter in some way. And I don’t want the photographs and the decaying leaves to melt away without some sort of memorial, however inadequate.

This series was created during a period of relative isolation. Even before Corona, I struggled to find a way to feel connected to an artistic community. Amid the upheaval surrounding the move from Asia to Europe, I continued to create, but it felt as if I was creating within a dark tower, with no audience, no critics, and no artistic companions to help guide the way.

Some artists approach their work starting from a peaceful center, but when I arrive in the studio, I begin wherever I am, which is usually in a state of mental chaos, and try to come down from there and sort through things. The works reflect this process; collaging various scraps that fit my mood and themes, and then trying to slowly bring them into some sort of harmony during my allotted studio time.

Most of these works started out with affixing a set of scraps from someone’s old family Bible, a page from my friend Jon Osterman’s old watercolor sketch book, and a few other odds and ends with relational connections, to brown paper. I then sourced old photographs that slightly resembled Osterman’s subjects, and expressively painted the new images on top. I drew a tangle of plants overtop it all until it became hopelessly busy. My challenge then was to try to simplify the composition with thin layers of gesso, deleting or deemphasizing distracting elements while still leaving hints of the former painting’s skeleton.

This was a process almost like mind-mapping, using scraps of memories and symbols of lost or distant relationships, visually depicting the way they fade in and out of eachother, combining to form new thoughts. This is the way I imagine the human mind and memory works, transforming and layering to create something new, while also eulogizing moments from the dimly flickering past. When the mind is full, we have to take control of our thoughts and wrestle them into submission to whatever practical task lies at hand. Art, in contrast, is about releasing those thoughts and impressions and allowing them to float and swim about, forming new impressions about old ideas in the safety of one’s dark tower, and even expressing wishes or blessings for the subjects or ghosts depicted. I let them roam free, and then at the end, strove to bring them back under my control. I wanted to test the limits of my media, to see how to cover and reveal with patterning and transparent layers.

The agonistic way I found myself striving to bring others into my artistic experience made me aware of the need, especially in the isolation of the pandemic, to involve others in my work in an even stronger way. This sparked the creation of an ongoing creative collective art project called The End of the World, where artists across various disciplines submit works, comment and respond to eachothers’ work, and springboard off existing submissions to create new threads of conversation. Several of these are included here, representing a more extreme attempt to break out of the dark tower, as well as to survive within it.

Participating in an exhibition that demanded 30 tiny 10x10cm works, I visually explored an ancient prophetic book that I’d always found puzzling. The themes of judgement, revelation, death, life, and growth that emerged amid a dazzling array of rainbows, spinning wheels, rivers of blood and rivers of water, and 4-headed celestial beasts made for a strange set of works, no stranger than the book itself and the ancient performance pieces the prophet was asked to execute.

As an artist, I found one overarching theme to be the insufficiency and limited nature of the available artistic tools to express an idea, much like the Ezekiel himself seems to fumble for words at times to adequately express mysterious flashing lights and strange creatures of his vision. “Like unto” is an oft-appearing phrase the prophet employs. I found myself using what I knew to be incomplete visual representations, limited by the array of colors, scraps of paper, and even the small scale of the images. Accurately, I’d say this project is only like unto Ezekiel.