Miro van der Vloed

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A Mending of Faith

The genesis of this project is situated within the complex and perpetually fluctuating relationship between my personal experience of Christian religious institutions and my perception of queerness. The realisation of the world that exists within me, where spirituality and sexuality are inherently interlinked, has found its way into the external world through my art practice and has manifested in a collection of images, modified found objects and physical interventions within sacred spaces.

These objects are palimpsests of child-like imaginative daydreams which unfold on hard wooden pews, marred by the harsh realities these fantasies contend with. They are conceived as relics; yet rather than originating in the past, they embody a utopia which has yet to manifest itself, where unconditional love and acceptance for all humans is practised through institutionalised Christian belief.

I ground my practice in the time spent as a child attending the Pretoria East Dutch Reformed Church, where my grandfather was a pastor for many decades. The architecture, memories of golden light streaming through the stained-glass windows and the rhythm of the service are all aspects that I became interested in exploring. These internal elements (both personal and structural) created a framework within which I could start to investigate institutional systems of religion as they brush up against sexuality politics.

It is through urging my spirituality and sexuality “to speak”, by casting the inward out towards the light that I have found the means in which to stitch together the chasm that has formed between them. The infinite possibilities of a Utopia under construction has inspired me to look at the world we currently inhabit through a wholly different lens. I hope that other queer individuals who struggle with their faith in something bigger than themselves as a result of mankind’s mistakes can take solace within the space mapped out and crafted by the tools I have been forging. In my search for the liminal space between the reality of institutionalised religion and the fantasy of my objects destabilising these systems from within, I have found a theoretical alcove in which to foster aspirations for amending my faith.