Figure/ground is a familiar visual relationship for artists and viewers. Traditionally describing any focal point’s setting in space, it usually references human persons. Figure/ground suggests hierarchical looking — the presence of the subject worth seeing, supported by, but not equal to, its surroundings. Hierarchy plays a prominent part in the history of Western conceptions of the human, no less in Christian theologies than in philosophy, politics, and the sciences. Predicated on binaries like heavenly/earthly, clergy/lay, rational/irrational, human bodies have long been sites upon which the mapping of these binaries has resulted in hierarchy. Bodies made savage or civilized, ordered or hysterical, bodies deemed sacred or profane, rendered in/visible, made il/legible, approaching a center or flung to the margins. Hierarchy, binary, and normativity have existed under various guises - Greco-Roman philosophy, Christian doctrines (especially those which locate original sin in sexual purity codes), and Enlightenment taxonomies and universalities, to name but a few. Trace humanisms through history and you will find some development and contributions to the world as we now understand it; still, much of the fruit of these metaphysics has been violent and controlling.
Can Christian theologies contain or extend an anthropology of mutuality, non-hierarchy, and specificity? After human exceptionalism, what gives our species worth? Theologian Rebecca Copeland argues for a “creation Christology,” finding that “deep incarnation,” akin to early church theologies of the Cosmic Christ, points to the incarnational care and presence of Christ in all God’s beloved creation — that through Christ the creator and redeemer, the entire world is within the loving purview of God, whose care for humankind is not in competition with God’s care for the world, but rather invites us to imitate God’s attentiveness to all that God has made. In regards to people as a category, queer theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid would argue for lived experiences, particularly those of the marginalized — especially the poor, non-male, queer, not white-bodied — as the proving ground for theological efficacy. A theology of the human person must account for the endless variety of humans, and must account for the movements and effects of power — thus theology and anthropology shift their gaze toward groups of people considered non-normative, but also theology and anthropology become almost endlessly specific by paying attention to stories and intersections.
Figure/Ground explores these problems and proposals through painting (utilizing portrait miniature and appropriation) and viewer participation, trusting that the multivalence of artwork is an ideal format for making any sort of proposition about human being. The portrait miniature is a now-obsolete genre born of deep love, and it revels in obscurity. Deep love because for a time portrait miniatures were perhaps the only image a person might have of a family member or other loved one. Prior to the ubiquity of photography, paintings were rare and expensive; portrait miniature was a democratization of image making for the express purpose of remembrance. Obscurity because a particular sub-genre of portrait miniature is known as the lover’s eye: tiny images of a single eye, set in cases or lockets or brooches, which a lover could wear or carry, secretly aware of the presence and identity of a lover who would be unknown to a casual observer.
For Figure/Ground I repurposed the lover’s eye/portrait miniature in order to activate a participatory element in the viewer’s experience of the work. The portrait miniature forces the viewer to pick up the delicate surfaces covered in minute forms, strain to see clearly, and fail to grasp the totality of the figure or its world. This required interaction should induce care and and tenderness, mimicking the action many of us make everyday when we look at our phones and see screensavers or social media feeds featuring images of people we love. However, the first participants who interacted with this work have also reported unease in the act of touching and moving the paintings. Initially, viewers expressed a feeling of violation because they are breaking the taboo against touching artwork. By extension, the participant interaction forces the viewer into complicity as they become the one who orders, controls, ruptures, or connects — inducing the risk of touching and re/arranging bodies in their settings.
Not only are the figures and their gestures rendered incomplete through the limited oval upon which they are painted, but each image is a copy of a painting made by some other artist. This deliberate and ongoing act of appropriation allows me as the artist to extend my own vision far beyond the specificity of my own time and place, but also points to the ongoing contradiction inherent to any representation - every act of description is still subject to layers of interpretation, limitation, and error. The images are from various continents and centuries, painted by various artists, depicting a range of gestures, emotions, and bodies. No taxonomy is possible. I can only offer an array of bodily experiences (laboring, dying, being remembered, acting violently, sleeping, playing music, experiencing eroticism, learning, experiencing pain, etc.) in settings which are too small, and too bounded, to even pretend to tell a full, let alone ideal, story.
Humans are finite. Here the figure/ground relationship is revitalized through association with Christian humility. “For you are dust, and to dust you will return,” we read in Genesis; and much later, “all flesh is like grass, and all its glory like the flower of grass” (1 Pet. 1:24 NRSV). The apostle Paul insists that despite describing people as fragile earthen vessels, we bear the light and glory of God (2 Cor. 4:7 NLT). The glowing, animated bits of emotion and activity represented on the miniatures are placed onto the inescapable realties of actual ground. Ground itself indicates erosion and decomposition, change and permanence, ingenuity and fecundity. A slab of slate or scrap of carpet may be seen as enduring compositions which have the capacity to extend beyond a human lifetime, but in context with gravel and grass and compost, all of these grounds ultimately point to dust. Every human body will certainly cease to exist. Yet Jesus names God as one who counts the very hairs on each human head, echoing the Psalmist’s comforting meditations on God’s knowledge of a person abiding with them even before they are born.
A faithful theological anthropology is witness to the vast array of human people in all their specificity and multiplicity and finds the imago Dei is not despite our creatureliness, not hidden behind errors or shortfalls, but that God is actually present in my own and my neighbor’s real life and personhood. A faithful theological anthropology cannot leave dust behind in pursuit of heaven; it must seek roots in whatever ground, becoming part of the neighborhoods and ecosystems we physically dwell in.