Antoni Gaudi once said, "Man does not create...he discovers." For the artist, so much of her work is in the gathering, the finding, the looking, the touching, the feeling, and of course ultimately the making; it is all a work of the hands, heart, mind, and soul. It is a "return," Gaudi says, "to the origin." The work of an artist, from prehistoric times to the present has always been one that straddles the earthly, in its material in particular, but also the transcendent, a seeking after something other than what lies before them here.

The Collegium Institute and Dappled Things welcome you to join us for this online panel featuring four artists, working across four different mediums: Kara Patrowicz, fiber artist, Daniel Mitsui, illustrator, Matilde Olivera, sculptor, and Caleb Kortokrax, painter.

In this Ars Vivendi Arts Initiative conversation, we will explore the relationship, particularly in these traditional mediums, and historically religious forms, of the tactile, ordinariness of these materials, but the ways in which in the hands of an artist they are transformed into things of beauty and may even help us commune with the divine. We will also engage the relationship between nature and beauty through these very earthly materials—wool, clay, stone, pigment, paper, vellum—and the ways that the embeddedness in the natural world speaks to a kind of sacramental imaginary, both in explicitly religious, but also less explicitly religious works. Drawing on the artistic practice of each of the four speakers, as well as an engagement with a long artistic tradition, this conversation will take a look at the ways in which contemporary Catholic artists engage the past as well as the present, the ordinary and the divine.

This special online event is cosponsored by Dappled Things, Ignatius Press, The Catholic Studies Master of Arts Program at the University of St. Thomas, MN, Wellspring: A Mother Artist Project, Image Journal, Nova Forum for Catholic Thought, Lumen Christi Institute, and Durham University’s Center for Catholic Studies.

Date: Tuesday, October 24

Time: 12pm-1:30pm

Location: Virtual (Zoom)

Click the button below to register.