CURRENT SHOW: Kitchen Hymns

Do you ever wonder what Jesus’ childhood looked like?

Did he sit on his mother’s feet, wrapping his arms around her legs and giggling while she tried to walk across the kitchen? 

Did he smile when she sang the songs he’d heard her sing a thousand times while she went about her chores?

Did he learn kindness from watching his mother stop for a neighbor? Did he learn perseverance from watching his dad work day after day to provide for their family in occupied Galilee? Did he learn to care and show compassion and allow others stories to move him from things his parents taught him, showed him?

Did Jesus think about Mary’s magnificat when he stood on a mountainside and said blessed are the poor in spirit, the mourners, the meek, the hungry, the persecuted…the kingdom coming comes for them?

I don’t suppose we can know with any certainty what parts of Jesus' life flowed from his divine nature and what came from his upbringing by Mary and Joseph. But, we know with certainty that the intimate relationships and everyday places in our lives directly impact, shape, guide, sometimes even determine our faith and how we embody it in the world. 

Kitchen hymns, a term for Irish songs historically not allowed in a Catholic Latin mass. Often composed by women, these songs conveyed the story of Jesus, with a frequent focus on the relationship between Jesus and his mother Mary. Written in Irish, a language often outlawed by English occupiers, kitchen hymns could often take on revolutionary or political tones simply by their use of the Irish language. They shaped the imaginations of listeners, usually those gathered in the home, to understand the story of the Gospel and the story of themselves.

We might call Mary’s song in Luke 1 a Kitchen Hymn; shared in a moment of spontaneous praise and recognition of God’s promises and faithfulness, Mary shares this hymn not in a grand temple or crowded square, but in the domestic space of Elizabeth’s home. The power and revolutionary beauty of Mary’s song lives on in the Gospel of Luke. Her words seem to echo in Christ’s when he lifts up the lowly, the broken, the hurting in the Beatitudes. Her words live on for us now, as we hear them and get swept up in her joy. 

Kitchen Hymns features work by five artists, and uses photography, poetry, sound, psyanky, drawing, and installation to look at how we share the story of Jesus in our everyday lives. Like Mary’s song, the works in this gallery remember the lessons learned, the everyday moments when the Spirit broke in, the legacy of faith we inherit, and more. As you view the work, I invite you to ponder the power of the domestic spaces and everyday people in your life and the ways they encourage, discourage, reinvigorate, or help you imagine what it means to follow Jesus.

Kitchen Hymns is curated by M. Kenyon

CLAIRE DAM

Artist Statement:

Culturally, we avoid thinking about disease and death, even though they are inescapable parts of life. Within eight months, my parents went from living independently to needing full-time care. My mother, living with vascular dementia, moved into a long-term care facility in December 2023. My father, in the final stages of Parkinson’s disease, passed away in hospital on March 25, 2024.
My parents had a lifetime of stories to tell. Through their portraits, I sought to reveal the people they remained beyond illness. My father’s images speak of strength, stubbornness, ingenuity, and courage—qualities that defined him throughout his life. My mother’s portraits reflect her elegance and love of beauty—flowers, jewelry, small pleasures—and her enduring struggle to quit smoking after 55 years.
Their final gift to me was their openness—their willingness to let me witness them at their most vulnerable. My gift in return was to never look away; to witness them with love and grace, without flinching.
Photography became a way to honour them and to make sense of their sudden decline. These intimate, unguarded images aim to connect with caregivers and children of aging parents, reminding us of the shared humanity that endures through fragility, loss, and change.

Charlotte Rose Eshelman

Artist Statement:

M'ma: As I wrestle with myself, I wrestle with my mother.

Both my mother and I survived domestic abuse as children, my mother again as an adult.

Our bodies carry our trauma, her body carried mine, and my body will cary those of my children.

M’ma contemplates what we do with what we’re given, how trauma is inherited and passed down to the next generation through the body, and the complex intimacy of the mother-child relationship.

As I consider motherhood, the house has become a motif through which I ponder the comforting and stifling nature of domesticity, mothers, and motherhood.

Vigil: “For a long time I have held my peace, I have kept still and restrained myself; now I will cry out like a woman in labor, I will gasp and pant.” - Isaiah 42:14

Across time and space, laboring women groan deep and low. Each new voice winding her way into the song of all mothers, crying out to God to relieve suffering, to bring the child for which we long into the world. Come and end travail, give me new life more beautiful even than the child passing from this womb.

Mary, as she labored with the aid of her Lord, cried for her God to come in gasps and pants and moans. And her King answered her, emerging from her womb. Now, we wait for Him to return. Now, I will cry out like a woman in labor, I will gasp and pant. I will join the cry of all creation, of all women who have ever given birth: “Maranatha! Come, Lord Jesus!”

Katherine Gastler

Artist Statement

Pysanky is a traditional art practiced in Ukraine. Typically eggs are decorated before Easter, but writing eggs in the winter helps me wait for spring. These eggshells are hollow. The larger is a chicken egg, while the smaller is a quail egg where I dissolved the dark spots with vinegar before beginning. The designs are made using a stylus called a kistka to draw with melted beeswax to protect the egg; pysanky is based on the Ukrainian word “to write.” Then the egg is dipped in dye, each time protecting the current color from the next dye. At the end of the process the dye is melted off to reveal the finished design.

Pysanky have been created since ancient times, with the oldest surviving eggshell being about 500 years old. Eggs were considered talismans, with both pagan and later Christian meaning attributed to both symbols and colors of the eggs. As a folk art, interpretation of symbols varies, but often the artist chooses symbols to support the intended recipient of the egg. These eggs use an eight-pointed star, which likely symbolized a mallow flower in Ukraine, but also appears in quilts made my several generations of women in my family. The smaller egg uses the 40 triangles division, which is one of my favorites for the endless possibilities for repeating shapes and colors in new ways. Although our heritage isn’t Ukrainian, making pysanky is a family tradition which I learned from my aunt as a child. We still enjoy the meditative process of writing eggs together, which is high on our list of relaxing activities for our Christmas vacation this year.

Megan Kenyon

Artist Statement

One of my favorite professors in college used to ask the class, “Did you get saved alone? Are you a Christian alone?”

The answer, no…of course not. But in what kind of community do we discover Jesus and learn what it means to follow Him?

As I pondered this idea in the winter of 2022, I started to wonder about my own family lineage, specifically my matrilineal inheritance. I know so many stories from my mom’s life and the lives of my grandmas that directly impact me; decisions they made that shaped how I came to exist in this world, the type of life offered to me, and even the chance to know and to fall in love with Jesus.

So, in February of 2023, my mom and I set out on a quest to uncover and collect stories, memories, and images of the places and people that shaped our lives and our faith journeys. We went back to our hometowns in Michigan, meeting with relatives, revisiting old churches and houses, streets, and restaurants. We bore witness to painful stories, past and present, to time redeemed, and the power of Jesus to make all things new, even our very messy family and its very messy history.

The works displayed here continue to morph and take shape; the final pages of this story still need exploring, the exact form of its telling still coming into view. I invite you into our story to witness what God can do in and through those who say yes, I will follow you, who build a life and a community around others to help them see the beauty and mystery of the Gospel.

This is our story, this is our song.

Fiona Moes Pel

Artist Statement

“Chronology, the time which changes things, makes them grow older, wears them out, and manages to dispose of them, chronologically, forever. Thank God there is kairos too: again the Greeks were wiser than we are. They had two words for time: chronos and kairos. Kairos is not measurable. Kairos is ontological. In kairos we are, we are fully in isness, not negatively, as Sartre saw the isness of the oak tree, but fully, wholly, positively. Kairos can sometimes enter, penetrate, break through chronos: the child at play, the painter at his easel, Serkin playing the Appassionata are in kairos. The saint in prayer, friends around the dinner table, the mother reaching out her arms for her newborn baby are in kairos.” - Madeleine L’Engle

Kairos, the poetic and embodied experience of time, is what I attempt to capture in this body of work. Drawing, in time, has become for me a ritual of slowing down, demanding an awareness of seeing the now, a holding in the present. These resulting artworks are a shadowland, a layered cartographic record of the collision of chronos and kairos, reminding me of all that I can see and all that I cannot.

These works are investigations of the path of light and resulting shadows through everyday glass objects, objects from my kitchen. This experience of working with the movement of light over time has slowly become a confrontation with the sublime; I’ve become increasingly aware of the ineffability of recording these moments and of archiving ordinary time.

In the Gallery

Install and Opening Photos courtesy of Kati Q. Gaschler and M. Kenyon