The two Awakening Banners, “Awake to Awe” and “Awake to Wonder,” were inspired by the recent deep space photographs taken by the Webb Space Telescope as well as the older Hubble Space Telescope. They invite us to contemplate the newly revealed vastness and stunning beauty of creation as well as our place and role within it and the very nature of such a creating God.
As the Awakening Service is an informal worship gathering at our church, I turned to a humble and common material—thrift store blue jeans—to construct a background of patchwork denim against which to explore the themes. Over this background, I used paint and fabric to suggest the nighttime sky and to impose simple but thought-provoking words. Each panel is framed with a thin burlap ribbon, painted with the traditional liturgical colors: purple for Advent and Easter, white/gold for Christmas, red for Pentecost, and green for Ordinary Time. This is intended to suggest that we look through a “window of faith” when we explore these questions regarding our ever-expanding environment. The banners are constructed of denim patchwork, acrylic, silk lettering, and burlap ribbon. Each panel is 25”by 60”.