Creation: How Art Wakes Us Up to The World Around Us
Yesterday we examined how the act of creation can be therapeutic, how it wakes us to the meaning of our more complex emotional realities. Creation not only helps us make sense of our emotional realities, though. It wakes us to the world around us, helps extract meaning from our physical realities too.
I sat with Sean Womack at The Depot—the best and only creperie in Fayetteville—and we “scraped the universe.” (Scraping the universe: Sean’s term for agendaless, free-range conversation.) We discussed his most recent piece of art, one made with heat-fused polyethylene, wood, and galvanized steel. The polyethylene came from Walmart grocery sacks, the steel from chicken wire. His media grew from our particular context. Northwest Arkansas is the home of both Walmart and Tyson, the worlds’ largest retailer and chicken producer respectively, and so, there are sacks and chicken wire aplenty. I asked Sean why he’s poured himself into his art these days, and why he chose these particular materials for his most recent art. He said,
“I started doing art again therapeutically because I needed to make stuff… and I starting making things with different materials, but the materials weren’t indigenous to me. I wanted something more from my world. I started looking for materials we had around the house, and I found these Walmart bags. As a material, it represented an amazing substrate.”
Melting those bags to chicken wire, Sean has created something unique, something indigenous to my landscape. And on the way to the office this morning, I saw an unmelted Walmart sack caught on a barbed-wire fence. I thought of Sean’s work, how his art is an homage to the common Arkansas eyesore (I don’t have to drive five miles to see a Walmart sack hung on a fence). At the same time, his art helps me see this eyesore in a new way, helps me recognize the beauty hiding in it. (If only I could apply a little heat.)
As he creates, Sean offers me the imagination to see beyond the raw materials of my locality, gives me new imagination for the possibilities hiding under my nose. And isn’t this the purpose of art? To wake us to the realities hiding in plain sight.
Check out Sean’s art. What do you think?
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Wake Up?
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