Always Becoming
While I was in high school, I felt something very important and powerful. Having been raised in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints since I was born, I wasn’t a stranger to the idea of defining moments, miracles, and spiritual feelings. However, I was taught that those things all pointed to God and his restored church. Strangely, that important and powerful thing I felt happened in my art class, not in Sunday school or during daily prayer.
It grew over time and the art room became somewhere I felt safe, where I felt like myself. I didn’t understand why no one else seemed to take art seriously. It was a bit of a joke class where students struggling with behaviour were often sent so they could get an easy GCSE. For me it was a haven. I entered my own little world in that classroom, while the teacher dealt with the occasional desk being set on fire using Spray Mount as fuel; that stuff was background noise.
I remember also being a voracious reader. I loved fiction, the more magical the better. I fell in love with Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, Harry Potter, and the works of Diana Wynne Jones. I soaked it all up until one day I realised it was all very dangerous. I needed to watch what I read and looked at because they were traps laid by Satan to tease me gently from the right path. I started to close the doors on some of those things. Books that had swearing, violence, sex, or blasphemy were thrown away, and my TV and film watching was strictly self-monitored to be family-friendly only. I sadly had to say goodbye to my favourite films of the time, The Matrix and Billy Elliot, which I recognised were no longer ok to enjoy.
My ultimate censure came when I chose my subjects and eventually felt very strongly that I couldn’t study art because the room had images of naked women, and we would have to practice life drawing. I changed my whole idea of myself in that moment and started on a path of archaeology, something which fascinated me but was also academically beyond me at that time.
But it was safe. I was safe now I had put what I believed was God’s will above my own. I then spent years worrying about slipping up and reading, watching, or listening to something I now deemed inappropriate. I would learn and push but only to a certain point; then I would remember my promises to God and abandon everything. Music especially spoke to me at this time, but it had to fit my standards, so long searches for music that meant something while not swearing or saying anything sexual brought up treasures such as Sufjan Stevens. I learned I could enjoy magical things if they were spiritual or spoke metaphorically about God.
Gently, I came back to art in the form of photography. I embarked on an education into the power of image making, first a BA, then an MA. I learned about how it can allow people to express themselves. How it can be a tool for social action or advertising, using visual language for communication. I learned that photographs can lie, and it was happening long before people used Photoshop. I began to understand that art can be a tool for asking questions, and photographing a person gives you a reason to talk to them in the first place.
The mind is a resilient thing though, and all these things I learned were able to be slotted into my belief system. Work I created was carefully thought about so that I could use these tools to glorify God and forward the mission of the church. I saw how the oppressed used photography to have a voice, and I believed my church was a victim of oppression and misunderstanding. It was my mission from God to use photography in any way I could, to promote his one and only true church.
I was miserable doing this. It was a constant tightrope walk, and my mind was a circus full of mental gymnasts. Every day was an effort, trying to make everything fit and make sense as I balanced my standards, my education, my terminally ill mother, two young children, a house, and a husband, who was in the process of leaving the church. I didn’t have the space to think about what I had learned till later, once the storm had passed. I found myself thinking my beliefs were not worth the pain required to hold on to them anymore and allowed myself to question them.
This is when what I had learned in school saved me. When everything I had been taught as truth since birth fell away, I was able to hold on to some things already prepared within me. Thoughts that had crossed my mind while I had undergone my education:
I feel magic when I create.
People are essentially good.
Life isn’t fair.
If I wasn’t a Christian, I would be a Humanist.
Perspective is relative.
The world is beautiful and unpredictable.
Meaning is subjective.
I looked at the work I created, and it took on new life. It no longer worshipped God; it exposed the grip my religion held. I had learned critical thinking, that it was important to listen to every side of an argument and understand for myself. I no longer wanted to have blind faith, obedience, or patience. I wanted to be me again.
I am now back at university and have the privilege of training to be an art psychotherapist in the UK. The important and powerful feelings I had as a fourteen-year-old are being proved to me over and over again as I learn about the power art has on the mind and body. No wonder we have been creating since the dawn of time. I no longer limit myself to only feeling and thinking up to a certain line drawn by someone else’s standards. I have now watched 18-rated films, and they have moved me to tears and taught me important lessons. I sing along to songs with swear words with a huge smile on my face, and I am collecting tattoos that are filled with meaning.
The learning continues, and hopefully it never stops. I hope to be always becoming.
Nicola Brophy is a photographer and art psychotherapy trainee in the UK. She loves to read and watches lots of TV. She also left the religion she was born and raised in at the age of 34, which turned her life upside down in what she now realises was a good way.
She is listed on the International Cultic Studies Association’s (ICSA) website as an artist whose work explores her experience in and leaving the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons).