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Ann Arbor woman’s work
becomes a holiday card
Helen Campbell
ANN ARBOR — For Helen Campbell, art is prayer and the creative
process is prayerful. What she creates, she
said, gets credit from and gives credit to God. Time to create,
however, is precious for this member of Christ the King Parish.
She's the mother of 10, a wife of 33 years, an art teacher for the
Explorers Homeschool Group in
Ypsilanti and a Washtenaw County Jail ministry volunteer. And yet
she's managed to carve out enough time to create 30 4-by-4-foot
collages in her favorite medium — construction paper, tissue paper,
glue and aluminum foil.
“I love the simplicity of the media,” said Campbell. “It's not
sophisticated or expensive. What I enjoy about what I do is that its
really up to God how it will look in the end.” Those collages — some
of which are hanging in her home,
others adorn the entryway at the school where her daughter teaches
and the rest are in her attic — represent
is a solid month of work. Campbell needs eight to 10 straight hours
of solitude — she calls them “retreat days” — to create each one.
“Im very intense about it,” she said. “It must be time set aside —
uninterrupted time— I need roughly 10 hours. It's not something I
can stop and pick up the next day. Its all created in one continuous
day. I consider it a day of prayer through my hands.”
On those days, she coordinates activities or places
for her children to go, leaves housework for another day and begins
fasting. “Its a prayerful experience,” she said. “I don't eat. It's
about putting on Scripture all day. I
start out by going to Mass and spending time in adoration of the
Blessed Sacrament. Then I pray for ideas. The whole day becomes a
retreat centered on the collage. She gets ideas from the some with a
Christmas theme.
“It's extremely easy to find ideas throughout the Church year,” she
said. “There are seasons, feast days, parables,
Scripture references, concrete items like rocks, seeds —there are
just countless subjects.” Her work emphasizes a Gospel message
because she sticks by her own motto: “If it doesn't witness to
Christ, then it's not worth doing.”
Rather than using a media such as acrylics, because “what you lay
down is what you get,” Campbell chooses uncertain materials such as
tissue paper and glue. “That's the fun of it for me,” she said. “I
love it. I have no
idea what will come of it.” God will reveal the art, she said. “I
consider each collage like a work of prayer,” she said.
“The neat thing about working with this type of media is that in the
end what looks like a total glob is transformed. When you use
Elmer's glue and there's 30 layers of bleeding tissue, you don't
know what will happen.
A few days later an image emerges. I do my part and then God does
the rest.” Recently, she took seven of
her designs and they became cover art for Christmas cards. The seven
Christmas designs include themes about waiting, the nativity, the
Holy Family, adoration of the holy infant, Emmanuel, a crèche scene
and a monstrance
with the Christ child in the center.
P r o c e e d s from the cards — each set of 28 sells for $20—
are directed into the jail ministry. “ T h e i d e a
c a m e t o m e a year ago to convert my collages to support the
Catholic jail ministry program,” said the
Eastern Michigan University art graduate. “It wasn't that hard to do
with the help of a computer to squeeze
them down from a 4-by-4- foot collage into a 4-by-6-inch Christmas
card.” Her husband, Joe, added a
catechetical commentary on the back of each card. “The cover art,
the inside message and the back commentary
are meant to draw the attention of the sender and the receiver of
the cards to the heart of the Gospel message,”
said Joe.
Lisa Briggs. Catholic Times. Volume 16-Number 9 2006
Download Article Here
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