#12 Politics: In the Now
February 2, 2025
Hi. To the new subscribers, let me fill you in. To mark my 20th year of making Glass Cathedrals, I’ll be intermittently sending out 20 emails describing this strange & wonderful job. This is email #12, about the political dimension of Glass Cathedrals.
My Background
I was drawn to study politics at Oxford University in the ’90s, not for the practical application but for the stimulating interchange between ideas. Actually, I was much more interested in the practical application of philosophy. Talk about living in an ivory tower!
Despite entering the ‘real’ world singularly unqualified to get a ‘real’ job, things I learnt there have informed my work. I remember hearing the word ‘dialectical’ for the first time. It was in a tutorial about Marxism, suggesting one could “discover what is true by considering opposite theories”. That idea struck me as quite brilliant. As I’ve mentioned often enough, this way of approaching the world is central to my art – maybe because you end up abandoning the very idea of opposites. Full account readable here.
Anyway, that idea informed my most recent politically-motivated artwork. So let’s start from now, and rewind to 2016, the year I began to express overtly political ideas in Glass Cathedrals.
2024 الامل عمل Hope is an action תקווה היא פעולה
This is a portrait of two peacemakers, Israeli Maoz Inon and Palestinian Aziz Sarah. Each has suffered terrible personal tragedies at the hands of the other’s ’tribe’ in the Middle East. But through radical empathy and a laser focus on what a viable future could look like, they’re committed to working together. “Our pain and sorrow has brought us together to create a better future.”
At a time where clarity and even words were/are elusive to me, I wanted to amplify their voices. The simple act of placing a Palestinian and Israeli together in a box felt like a radical act. In the end people on both sides felt they could relate to the artwork, which meant a lot to me.
Hear Maoz and Aziz’s Ted Talk
Visit my fundraiser to continue supporting their mission
2024 The Wish
I made this Glass Cathedral to raise funds for the Palestinian-Israeli grassroots organisation Standing Together. The Wish envisages a place where something that seems impossible in this moment, is not only possible but also simple and natural – two children from different tribes walking hand-in-hand in a field, looking up at a shooting star.
It was inspired by a Rumi poem:
Out Beyond Ideas of Wrongdoing and Rightdoing
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
There is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
The world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
Doesn’t make any sense.
Click to learn more about Standing Together.
2020 No-one is Too Small to Make a Difference
This portrait of Greta Thunberg, the diminutive Swedish environmental activist, expressed the power of individuals, no matter how small, to inspire collective action and hope.
Click to see the artwork in more detail.
2020 The Dissenter’s Hope*
I made the first edition of this artbox in July 2020 – praying for RBG’s good health.
The day after RBG died in September 2020, I decided to auction The Dissenter’s Hope. In fact it was so popular I auctioned 5, raising over $6000 for the Sierra Club, the biggest environmental charity in the US. It was a consolation in that fraught time, to think of a squad of tiny RBGs now out there in the world, still making an impact.
*The title comes from RBG’s oft quoted words: “…that’s the dissenter’s hope: that they are writing not for today, but for tomorrow…”
While RBG was still alive, Ralph and I threw a RGB disco. Everyone had to come as Ruth Bader Ginsburg. It was absolutely bloody brilliant.
2016 This is what humanity looks like
I made one protester every day for Trump’s first 100 days culminating in the Climate March in April 2017. All the posters are miniaturised versions of real ones used in the marches around the world, and many have become iconic, used again and again over the years in the progressive movement.
The original 100 protestor artwork was raffled, raising over $3000 for Earthjustice and another version raised $5000 for The Headlands Center for the Arts, Marin.
The title comes from a ‘call and response’ chant I heard at San Francisco airport in January 2017, protesting the pending federal Muslim Ban.
People were chanting “Show me what humanity looks like” with the response being “This is what humanity looks like“. I found myself calling: “Show me what America looks like” because that question was really burning in me, 7 years into living there. The crowd answered: “This is what America looks like”. No doubt there is not just one America, but there was this America, this version of humanity, and it was the inspiration for this project.
There were quite a few spin-offs of this design, Princess Leia even got a Glass Cathedral of her own A Woman’s Place is in the Resistance. Maybe every princess needs her own Glass Cathedral!
We ended up taking banners to bonfires on the beach, leaving miniature protestors around town for people to discover….it was an active time.
I think there’s been some evolution in my politics since 2016. Back then, I went through a lot of soul-searching, and engaged for the first time in the political arena, in my art and irl.
Nowadays, I feel downright overwhelmed by the complexities. Not exactly clear what the way forward is but I think it may have something to do with the idea I started with “discovering what is true by considering opposite theories”. Maybe it’s time to give Marx another go… (joking, well at minimum don’t have a clue what I mean by that!).
Thanks for reading.
Bye for now, Lisa