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Elbie Visser & Lizelle Lazarus

The collaborative installation piece Thin Places by artists Lizelle Lazarus and Elbie Visser draws inspiration from the multiple accounts throughout biblical times where stones of remembrance were erected to mark a specific place and point in time where God communed with man.


These were moments in which man was spoken to, made a covenant with, or miraculously intervened for. The monuments intersect two spheres, the sacred and the earthly. They ground intangible memories and divine occurrences in the physical.


Together with being drenched in the aromatic spice cinnamon, Thin Places holds within itself the essential elements of communion. It is seeped with wine, thrown with flour and continuously worked with the artists’ hand. The muslin cloth’s stains, tears and stitches allude to the feeling of being between a rock and a hard place, wrestled with and entangled in a messy encounter.


The dirt stains are further activated as the natural light from the building’s open ceiling streams in, transforming the cloth into a textural play of light and dark. The veil between the physical and the spiritual becomes transparent.


We find ourselves in a current time and age of thin moments rife with suffering, uncertainty, isolation, confusion and loss. Our worldview is shaken and forced to expand as our conversations with God become marked with raw, honest and even violent emotion.

 

As a monument of gratitude, Thin Places navigates the question of whether it is in these authentic moments that one is truly met with and sanctified?

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