Eye See Trinity: Trinity College Artist-in-Residence 2014-2015
Sheona Beaumont
Blind Sight Press, 2016
21cm x 21cm; 76pp; 38 colour illustrations
perfect bound, printed on 148gsm eggshell paper, with a 270gsm cover
PB: 978-0-9930431-2-3
In the 2014-15 academic year, Trinity College Bristol appointed photographer Sheona Beaumont as Artist-in-Residence. With a studio on site, and access to every aspect of theological college life, Sheona produced over 30 artworks, interventions, and installations during her time there.
Eye See Trinity is a catalogue of this work, and includes articles from faculty staff and entries from the artist’s blog, as well as colour plates of all the pieces. The final commission of the residency, Canopy Compass Rose (a lightbox ceiling installation in the Chapel), completed a project in which history, community, and theology found innovative and engaging representation through photographic media.
Having an artist-in-residence at the college for the duration of the academic year has been a challenging, surprising, inspiring and at times baffling experience. Sheona made her presence known not only as a person approachable for stimulating conversations about art, theology and the Christian life in the world over lunch and coffee, but increasingly through a growing assembly of photographic exhibits accompanied by thought-full and thought provoking captions with philosophical and theological reflections. Towards the end of the year, wandering through the aisles and corridors of Trinity College increasingly became an adventure of the mind, because exhibits began to pop up everywhere, sometimes in the most unexpected places with images that surprised, delighted, and sometimes humbled me as a theologian and Christian educator.
Revd Dr Knut Heim, Tutor in Old Testament
The lived experience of having an artist-in-residence at a theological college is that of encountering the perspectives of the outside. This can happen in a comforting way such that we are reminded of the trees, the sky and the world of nature, traditionally the zone off natural spiritual revelation. Such natural images have sprung up all over Trinity bringing a canopy of trees to the chapel roof and bringing vistas of distant skylines to dark and forgotten corridors. But it can also be less comforting. Artists do not seem to think in the accepted cognitive structures of sequential thought and their perspectives can appear random, even chaotic and oblique to the expected pathway of thinking theologically. … [Hers] is a rebuke to the perceived truth of the library and of traditional theological insight and a reminder that God frustrates the wisdom of the wise. Maybe it is a comforting insight to those who come into the college from outside, because it reminds them that we concern ourselves with the world outside.
Revd Dr Howard Worsley, Tutor in Missiology
It has been wonderful to have Sheona Beaumont as part of the Trinity College community over this past year as Artist-in-Residence. … What Sheona’s presence has brought to the community, especially in a year where we have been discerning and re-focusing vision, has been immense, … a prophetic voice proclaiming the nearness of the kingdom and reflecting the values of humility, service, worship, courage, diversity, holiness, wholeness and justice that form the backbone of community life at college.
Revd Dr Emma Ineson, Principal
Contents:
- Foreword by Revd Dr Emma Ineson, Principal
- EYE: History by Sheona Beaumont, featuring Lineament Series and Album Series
- SEE: Community by Revd Dr Howard Worsley, featuring Kingdom Series
- TRINITY: Theology by Revd Dr Knut Heim, featuring Interventions and Canopy Compass Rose
- Unfurled: poem by Denis Adide