Multifaith Musings: The Beauty of Sin

Hello all! My name is Lauren Williams, and I’m a freshman currently enrolled in The Day Course: Idea Development, ART-115, here at Gustavus. Over the semester, our class studies how contemporary artists understand and work with their materials, content, and subject inside a formal, conceptual, and cultural framework. We incorporate these ideas into four of our own artworks throughout the semester, each created based on four different topics (which we choose at the beginning of the semester) and subsequently named after “The Day of ______” with our topic for the project inserted in the blank. For example, our first project based on the topic of suspense, making that project title “The Day of Suspense. For our second project, my class chose the topic of sin, making that project “The Day of Sin”.

For “The Day of Sin”, I decided to focus on a less-discussed side of sin, and I created this artwork titled “The Beauty of Sin”. This artwork mixes the concept of salvation for sinful, broken humans with Kintsugi, an ancient Japanese art form in which broken pottery is repaired with gold lacquer. Kintsugi highlights the cracks and breaks in the pottery to emphasize that the piece of pottery is more beautiful having been broken. This powerful philosophy behind Kintsugi can be applied to our lives as well. Even though we are made in the image of a perfect God, we constantly fall short with our filthy, sinful nature. We chip away at ourselves and others until all that is left is a pile of cracked pieces. Yet time and time again, He picks up our jagged, broken pieces and binds them back together with a beautiful, golden touch to create a glorious masterpiece out of sins and sinners.

The artwork will be displayed outside the Bonnier Multifaith Center in Anderson Hall through Friday March 19, 2021.