Like Living Stones (diptych)

Modular Diptych:
"LIKE LIVING STONES", digital laminate to black aluminum, 30" x 21"
"AS A PILLAR", digital laminate to black aluminum, 30" x 21

Stone; religious construction's first material—used to build Abraham's altar of living stones as the spiritual house of God. Like Living Stones (diptych) attends to the echoing typologies and shared structures between old and new testaments. From Jacob's journey to our present travels we're built into holy habitats—nomadic, Abrahamic essences calling us back through rough building-blocks and excavations of rock. First, best substance in forming individual and communal spiritual histories in tabernacles hewn of our earliest dwellings and devotion to God.

Layered, dimensional typographic design allows Scripture and language to move, setting the stone pillars in the digital laminate to aluminum diptych Like Living Stones. Typology and typography seamlessly merge while maintaining their covenantal character. Architectural landscapes interiorly engage with intertextual reciprocal, foundational material and motion of living stones—God's house. In this engagement, twin-like pieces inform each other as stanchions of constancy, architecturally solid and in concord. Through scratchy subway quiddities of urban typography, deconstructed visceral and visual landscapes and the brick-laying of language and letterforms, a spiritual house is built. Whether in homeless communities of underground metro or in rarified ethers of wealth, we're invited into this spiritual house of living stones, to enter in devotion.

Like Living Stones realizes moments of quintessential journey—reiterated in palette and set by typographic repetition and insistence. These move us beyond linear language into kairos becoming of spiritual construction, contemplation, completion. We enter and connect to our faith in all its physicality. Divine work of stone; and work of human hands. God's covenantal meeting places in the spiritual masonry of building as living stones our houses and dwelling-places of lived faith.

© 2009 Deborah Risa Mrantz, www.logosdivinity.com

Currently, together with the initial body of artworks now on the website, a full, forthcoming larger body of LOGOSdivinity artworks is in progress and will come to fruition during the next month. Our prayer is for you to fully experience these initial works including what attends them pastorally and theologically; and that you'll bookmark and return to the site frequently to view new artworks as they come into being, bringing God's Word to dwell.

Deborah Risa Mrantz is an incoming MDIV seminarian at Pacific School of Religion; she is also creative principal of LOGOSdivinity llc, a contemporary liturgical arts and design company fusing art and faith in a new conceptual paradigm revealing God's word in Scripture.

Deborah's work has developed over thirty years from beginnings in music and fine art apprenticeships at Congregationalist Punahou School, continuing through Jewish ecclesiastical work in sculpture and liturgical arts, maturing and culminating in work held within the lexicon of language—publishing, printing, and multi-sensory digital design. From linotype slugs to digital type-cuts, her pastoral and artistic callings come to fruition in design and art, iconography, semiotics, language and typography as they coalesce in LOGOSdivinity.

Deborah's journey into seminary has re-formed long-held arts vocations within a life of God's Word and pastoral ministry. Through LOGOSdivinity she fashions liturgical artwork for individual and community religious spaces, monasteries and faith-based retreat-centers, churches and synagogues. Creating through God's holy word in Scripture, her work speaks into devotional life held within the heart, forged of both sacred and secular and manifest in missional, intentional living in Christ. Grace and Holy Spirit inform LOGOSdivinity artworks engendering Deborah's spiritual substance; intertestamental synthesis of Abrahamic traditions melding Judaism's culture, faith and ethnicity with Christianity's resplendent devotional and contemplative life. A passionate artistic faith made in God's image, fully realized as divine reflection in theological richness of the New Covenant in Jesus Christ.

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