Babel and Pentecost

2008
Digitally blended tactile media and photography

Between Babel and today, we've continued to build monuments to ourselves. Seeking to salvage fallenness, we sing about stairways to heaven and wave banners of creaturely pride. In 2009, our creativity remains lowercase, often driven by self-aggrandizement and reflecting only dimly the Creator's weight. Babel portrays the creature-Creator divide as a human-made alienation which obscures God's identity in mist.

It is God who must initiate, and at Pentecost it is God who powerfully does. In that moment, a forgiven humanity gathers around a Christ-bridged chasm. Empowered by reconciliation, and liberated by the Spirit from brokenness and the prison of language, we speak once again in free, worshipping tongues. Pentecost is the renewal of relationship between creature and Creator.

Harold Sikkema creates digital tapestries with diverse tactile media and software tools, finding communicative potential in weaving together painting, sculptural arrangement, photography, and collage. Though often theologically rooted, his pieces also engage in a playful, poetic aesthetic. He is encouraged by the Christian story of redemption to bring about a cohesive, unified remix of our fallen world's textures within narratives of hope. Each story aims to reconcile some tension between local and global, content and context, organic and synthetic. By walking whimsically within the themes of language, time, growth, and resurrection, his layered images uphold the gravity of spiritual reflection even as they comically engage in a child's game of I-spy.

Sikkema lives in Hamilton, Ontario, where he applies the philosophy "think globally, live locally" to his freelance web and graphic design work. Dig deeper at www.nsitu.ca.

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