The Placemaker’s Art
This summer Poiema Visual Arts will be holding its very first biennial art conference, “Finding Our Place: The Artist, the Church & Placemaking,” in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. As we prepare for this exciting event, we want to introduce you to some of the unique individuals who will be presenting this year. Our speakers bring together a rich mix of experiences that we feel sure will encourage and challenge all who attend.
Among this group is author, artist and placemaker Christie Purifoy. Christie is presenting two sessions at this summer’s conference: “Artists as Placemakers: How Art Creates, Communicates, and Sustains our Places” & “Place as Muse: How a Placemaking Life Inspires a Creative Life.” The topic of placemaking has been a passion of Christie’s for many years and she has a wealth of wisdom to share. Sit back and contemplate this topic with her in our most recent guest blog, “The Placemaker’s Art.”
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How do we cultivate an ordinary place so that it grows into a sanctuary? How do we turn commonplace walls into shelter? We begin with a dream or a desire. No, not a desire for rustic shiplapped walls or white subway tile shining like a flawless smile. Those desires are as fleeting as the commercial break between one home makeover television show and the next. As much as we may want those things, we know there will always be something new to want tomorrow. But there are wants that never leave us. There are desires so deeply rooted in our hearts, we disregard them at our peril. The longing for home is like that. It is a longing so universal we have a word to describe the ache of it: homesick.
Doctors care for bodies. Gardeners tend the soil. But who welcomes the homesick home? Who looks after the spaces we share with one another? For more than twenty years, in apartments and condominiums, in a ranch house and now a farmhouse, I have tried to turn houses into homes. I have tried to turn places into paradise. And though I did not know it, in every one of those places, I was a woman in search of a name for the work I felt so compelled to pursue. I needed a name spacious enough to hold all of the beautiful things I loved to cultivate, from conversations around the table to potted geraniums on the window sill. Homemaker? Hostess? Gardener? Artist? I have finally found my name, and it carries shades of all those things. And having found my name, I have found, not only a description of my lifelong calling, a name that makes sense of my past, present and future, but also a name for the God who reveals more of himself in every season of our walk with him. Because we are all made in God’s image, I believe this name is also yours. Like the God to whom we belong, we are placemakers.
What is placemaking? It is the care and keeping of places and all those who dwell in them. Placemakers deliberately send their roots deep into a place. They are like trees searching out the water they believe God causes to flow in every place. Our Maker has always carved out special places for his people, from gardens to promised lands, and every time we prepare a place for others, we are following in the footsteps of our beauty-loving, placemaking Creator God. Beauty is one of the languages of God. He reveals himself to us and communicates with us in the bright beauty of a full moon and the intoxicating beauty of a moonflower vine. Beauty matters. Beauty is the song of the created world, and we are, each of us, invited to listen and invited to join in.
Our eyes may be captivated by perfect images of seemingly perfect houses, but homes are living places, and they are made in the way a tree is made: by sowing small seeds. A house becomes a home through the slow accumulation of love and time, like the mysterious alchemy of sunlight and rain that gives us a garden. We cultivate home by washing the dishes (one more time), sweeping the floor (one more time), scrubbing the crayon marks off the wall (one more time), and setting the table for family or friends (yes, one more time). We create a home by creating space to create. Whether we call ourselves vocational artists or weekend hobbyists or have no name for our work of making, we are each made in the image of a Creator. We need places that encourage and support creativity. These are such small seeds, and it is easy to grow discouraged, easy to feel as if we are making no progress toward our larger vision, but even the biggest trees begin as acorns. Rarely do we get to see how much the world will be altered for the better by our own small seed. Let us sow our small daily seeds with hope.
Some trees are easy to move, but some trees hate to have their roots disturbed. And we are a lot like trees. Many of us long to put down roots in some particular place, but we guard ourselves against heartbreak by waiting for a perfect place, or a “forever” place. We know how much it will hurt if we have to pull those roots up again. Better to keep our hearts closed. Better to live along the surface of a place. If we love peony flowers, we tell ourselves we’ll plant them at the next house. If we love the color pink, we tell ourselves we’ll paint our bedroom pink “one day.” But roots aren’t simply the anchors that hold us in a place. Roots are nourishment. They give life to us, the way they give water and nutrients to a tree. Yes, it hurts to be transplanted, it hurts to tear up deep roots, but it hurts more to cut ourselves off from people and places. Loving our place might hurt, but not loving it will hurt more in the end.
So be brave enough to love. Risk your heart and care for your current place, even if it is imperfect and even if it isn’t permanent. My husband and I once lived in a small east Texas town for only three months. We called our temporary home the “plastic apartment” because the kitchen cabinets that looked like carved oak were actually made of plastic, the open shelves with a dark wood-grain pattern in the living room were also plastic, every doorknob and towel rack was brittle plastic, and even the apartment’s tiny patio was planted with plastic grass in a too-cheerful shade of green. Could there possibly be less fertile soil than a mere three months in a plastic place? And yet the seed of community we planted there grew fast and fruitful, like the bird-tossed seed of a mulberry tree that leaps from seedling to giant in a matter of weeks. The love and beauty we received from the community who gathered in our plastic apartment still feels, twenty years later, like good, rich soil beneath my feet. I may have left that town and that apartment, but my own roots are still nourished by the home we made there and the people who gathered with us.
Placemakers are always making. They do not sit around admiring the perfection of their tiles and the cleanliness of their carpets. They are the cultivators, the keepers, the restorers. They understand that placemaking is a process, not a final product. I have been a placemaker for twenty years, but I admit that I do still resent this truth. I long for clean floors that stay clean, new wood porches that do not rot, and when the white tulips in the flower garden are at their peak, I wish they would stay just the same, forever. But a tulip that isn’t growing is a dying tulip. Dead things, like plastic things, are risk-free and easy to manage, but can they feed the soul? If I want a home that is alive, I think I must accept the chaos of its living.
Home for us now is an old red brick farmhouse called Maplehurst in southern Chester County, Pennsylvania. Not long after moving here, an inspector from our home insurance company came by for what would become the first of his annual assessments. Apparently, this is something insurance companies do with older homes because insurers know a truth about old houses that my husband and I were only beginning to grasp: look away for an instant, and they age twenty years. Limestone mortar crumbles. Handmade bricks crack. Porches rot. The agent’s report when it arrived by mail was devastating: “You have one year to make repairs, or your policy may be terminated.” But I have learned to find hope in the words of the English poet George Meredith:
Earth knows no desolation.
She smells regeneration
In the moist breath of decay.
Decay and decline are not the end of the story. They are an invitation to practice resurrection. What place has been given to you to tend? Tend it faithfully, and I promise you, your place will inspire and nurture you in return.
