Biography
Anne C. Nelson is in her first year as a Master's of Divinity student at Princeton Theological Seminary. Previously she was a Professor of Practice at Tulane University in New Orleans, teaching and practicing painting and drawing. Her experiences as an artist and educator led her to pursue theological education, considering the intersections of creativity, criticality, and materiality in individual and communal spiritual formation.
Paper Abstract
I propose an artist talk concerning Ambiguous Loss, an exhibition of original abstract paintings that are meditations on grief as it accompanies unresolved or drawn out rupture. While the term originated in clinical and therapeutic settings, ambiguous loss is appropriate for a variety of communal experiences in recent years, among them, climate grief. Climate grief contains many complex variations, including the rage of those who are powerless to stop its effects on their homes, sadness over lost species and habitats, and a pervasive sense of impending doom. Conversation about climate grief should also include discussion of remorse. Art - its methods, means, and ends - is important in the midst of crisis for many reasons; among them: its capacity to invite and contain catharsis, its tendency toward productive confrontation, and its gracious regeneration of imagination. Ideally, healthy religious practices and interactions with sacred texts yield similar spaces, as well as actionable outcomes, albeit through alternative means. Ecologies, like paintings, are intricate and unfolding configurations which include the devastating impacts of human exploitation. Places are also locations much loved by humans. My neighbors grieve when their home are lost or endangered. In order to enable the well-being of others, those who are privileged must exercise joy in revision and embrace the discomfort of repentance. Practices of making are spaces for playing with limitation, unmaking, and redoing. In the midst of ecological degradation and catastrophic loss of place, reckoning with honest grief and hopeful resistance is essential to sustainable practice. Ambiguous Loss invites its viewers into identification and exploration. The work is an invitation for theologians and scientists, community organizers and other artists, to think about their own processes of mourning, hoping, imagining, and revising.