Yale Divinity School, Marquand Chapel, Yale University
New Haven, Connecticut
Photographic Duraclears
86 panels, 8" x 11 5/6"
One of the very first communications from God to human beings is a question. In Genesis 3, God asks Adam and Eve, Where are you?
This site-specific installation by Jo Yarrington endeavors to answer that question. The work consists of a ribbon of translucent photographs taken by Yarrington during her peregrinations around the globe over the past twenty years. She describes them as a private ritual, an attempt to "capture and retain through photography, random but compelling experiences in which I explored the nature of spirituality." Fitted into the windowpanes, these fragmented glimpses are structured in subtle cadences that recall the changing seasons, musical rhythms, narrative stained glass, and the episodic pages of an illuminated manuscript. The band of images emphasizes the sanctuary's interior spatiality and is placed low enough to permit intimate viewing. Once altered, layered, and ignited by sunlight, however, these snippet views of familiar and unfamiliar places encourage us to contemplate the world beyond the chapel's walls. Their profusion conjures life's fragmentary and ephemeral nature, and how we grasp, lose, and refashion ourselves and sense of place--individually, in community, and over time.
In keeping with the work's organic nature, Yarrington invited YDS students to collaborate on new images that have been incorporated in to the installation, comprising the work's "second blossoming".
Judith Dupré, MDiv. '11
