The hidden geographies of religious creativity: place-making and material culture in West London faith communities (original) (raw)

Religion, art and creativity in the global city

Culture and Religion

At the mention of the theme of religion, art and creativity, one might think about splendid houses of worship, artfully decorated manuscripts of sacred texts, beautifully crafted artefacts like altars, statues and icons or small intricately worked Torah pointers or elaborately carved Qur'an reading stands. Monumental churches, mosques, synagogues, Hindu or Buddhist temples, religious shrines and other spiritual sites often include impressive art work. Museum shelves are crowded with remarkable artefacts originating all over the world and representing millennia of faith-inspired creativity. Diverse genres of spiritual music are praised for their beauty. Without doubt, incredible artwork and beauty can be found in famous sites of worship, international museums, concert halls and venues of spiritual music. But, is the intersection of religion, art and creativity limited to iconic houses of worship, museums and spiritual artefacts (largely of the past)? The question emerges of what kinds of religious art and artefacts are produced today? What are contemporary manifestations of spiritual creativity? What examples of faith-inspired arts can be found among the ordinary urbanites and faith communities in cities across the globe? This special issue explores a broad range of questions about contemporary faith-based art, creativity and expressive life. It takes readers to more unlikely places that are situated beyond the beaten path of famous houses of worship and dominant art worlds to witness and explore complex interactions between religion, art and creativity in global or globalising cities. The six authors in this issue introduce ordinary and often invisible urban faith-inspired spaces and lifeworlds. They explore informal or vernacular arts, expressive cultures and creativity in 'unexpected places' (Wali, Severson, and Longoni 2002), where ordinary pious urbanites engage in creative activities, generate astounding artefacts and creative expressions, critically engage cities and spaces and produce meaning for themselves, their neighbours and communities. The authors examine faith-inspired creative works and practices, like culinary arts, sartorial expressions and the religious reworking of popular music genres that are not

Building the Sacred in Suburbia: Improvisation, Reinvention and Innovation

Built Environment, 2015

This paper explores diverse practices of religious place-making in suburban space drawing from a research project on the making of suburban faith in West London. We argue that the creative cultures and spaces of suburban faith communities are often marginalized in enduring narratives of secular suburban materialism. In contrast through an analysis of creative responses to suburban space by different faith communities, at different time periods, we suggest both the persistence of suburban faiths and the creativity of suburban faith communities. We argue that creativity is evident through processes of improvisation in the creation of makeshift places of worship in early 'frontier suburbs' and in the creative re-adaptation and re-invention of former buildings to new places of worship, often by diasporic faith communities. Finally we emphasise architectural innovation in making new places of worship which engage directly and imaginatively with suburban space. Our analysis suggests the importance of suburban faith communities in the making of suburban spaces and cultures, and the relevance of religion, and sacred place-making, in wider re-evaluations of suburban creativity.

My Life is but a weaving: embroidering geographies of faith and place

cultural geographies

This article reflects on creative arts practice as a means to research the interrelationships of creativity and faith through discussion of a textile-based arts project undertaken with women of diverse religious backgrounds in West London. Building on research on the significance of vernacular religious textiles in community space and in domestic religious practice, the arts project developed a collective embroidery installation exploring the theme of prayer and its intersections with embodied practices of creativity and biographical narratives of faith, migration and home.

Mapping ‘new’ geographies of religion: politics and poetics in modernity

Progress in Human Geography, 2001

This article reviews geographical research on religion in the 1990s, and highlights work from neighbouring disciplines where relevant. Contrary to views that the field is incoherent, I suggest that much of the literature pays attention to several key themes, particularly, the politics and poetics of religious place, identity and community. I illustrate the key issues, arguments and conceptualizations in these areas, and suggest various ways forward. These ‘new’ geographies emphasize different sites of religious practice beyond the ‘officially sacred’; different sensuous sacred geographies; different religions in different historical and place-specific contexts; different geographical scales of analysis; different constitutions of population and their experience of and effect on religious place, identity and community; different dialectics (sociospatial, public-private, politics-poetics); and different moralities.

Arts practice as method, urban spaces and intra- active faiths

This paper examines the research design for an arts-based interfaith research project that is intended to build relationships between children from different faiths and to increase research participants' understandings of faiths other than their own. The project is funded as an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship called Early Start Arts to Counter Radicalization and has a mixed method approach that brings arts-based workshop groups for children together with focus groups for parents. Early findings demonstrate the utility of art for developing a sense of belonging and self-worth in children and clearly show ways in which art facilitates comment on complex social issues even from primary school age. The nature of such socially engaged arts-based research means it must be developed or, at the least, refined, through engagement with community and social context. As such, consideration of the urban environment that shapes the lives of the young research participants and their families forms part of the discussion undertaken.

Between the Sacred and Secular: Faith, Space, and Place in the Twenty-First Century

Architecture and Culture, 2023

In his 1954 poem, “Church Going,” Phillip Larkin anticipated the end of religion and the ruination of Britain’s churches. “What remains,” Larkin asked “when disbelief has gone? Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky.” In one respect, Larkin was right: the decline of traditional worship in the West did produce scores of redundant churches. But he was also wrong: the tendency to view abandoned churches as proof that ultimately “belief must die,” misses the myriad ways in which faith has, in fact, simply reconfigured and produced new spaces. Such weaknesses in the Western-centric disenchantment model have been recognized in the social sciences, where scholars are increasingly looking toward the built environment to understand new alignments in religion and society. However, the field remains somewhat overlooked by architectural theorists and historians. This article explores religious practices from an architectural perspective, offering an overview of faith, space and place in the twenty-first century.

Spaces of vernacular creativity reconsidered

Creative Placemaking, 2018

Our edited volume, Space of Vernacular Creativity: Rethinking the Cultural Economy (2009) critically responded to the preoccupations that had dominated writing on creative place-making. In this chapter, we focus on the book's key imperatives: to decentre instrumental and reductive conceptions about the location of creativity that were oriented around dominant notions of the 'creative economy', and interrogate how alternatively, creativity might be far more expansively conceived. We identify what remains salient in our original arguments, which areas of creative place-making we ignored and underplayed, and key contributions that have advanced thinking about creative geographies since the book's publication.