Fishing equipment. Shapinsay, Orkney, United Kingdom.
Jesus would, indeed, teach them to cast a new kind of net - a net of love and compassion, a net of teaching and healing, a net of salvation - over the people they met. But it never would have happened if they hadn't left their fishing nets.
In the 1990s artist Janet Echelman picked up fishing nets. In Mahabalipuram, India, to be precise. Spending a Fulbright year in India, Echelman had shipped her painting supplies ahead of her arrival. But they never arrived. Struck by the art and design qualities of the local fishing nets, she began to formulate what would be a new sculptural language by suspending and coloring the nets.
Her fishing net sculptures are cast over multiple city blocks. They can be a big as a building - hundreds of feet long, hundreds of feet wide and hundreds of feet tall. They register every breath of wind and move and change in appearance depending on the weather, the time of day and the position of the viewer. The fluidity of the materials contrasts with the rigid buildings that often surround Echelman's urban work.
People stand under these nets while they have picnic lunches, while they wonder, while they marvel at these nets. From such intricate laciness - flimsy, one might think - comes a massive thing that attracts the attention of and speaks to national and even international audiences yet retains an ethereal quality. All from people who understand fishing nets. Who could have imagined.
Upper photo: Her Secret is Patience. 2006. Phoenix, AZ.
Lower photos: Skies Painted with Unnumbered Sparks. 2014. Vancouver, BC, Canada.
Check this week's Art&Faith Matters post on Facebook for thoughts about fishing in Jesus' time. It's not cane poles and crickets for bait.
For thoughts on the Epiphany 3B reading from Hebrew scripture, Jonah 3:1-10, click here.
For thoughts on the Epiphany 3B reading from Hebrew scripture, Jonah 3:1-10, click here.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/25/world/africa/mosquito-nets-for-malaria-spawn-new-epidemic-overfishing.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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