Engaging the Image: Visual Creativity in Contemporary Dutch Protestantism

Description

The research project The New Illuminators: Women in Search of Spiritual Authority and Resilience provides us with a remarkable level of access to the work of women bible journallers. In addition to questions about gender, agency and interpretation, the project demonstrates once more the enduring dynamics between the textual and visual in Christian contexts. One of the contexts the
project has studied, is the Netherlands, known as one of the most rapidly secularized countries in Western Europe. This secularization process has not resulted in a complete vanishing of Christianity from the public domain, but has rather resulted in a transformed, diversified and culturalized societal position of Christianity. One notable aspect of this position is the rising prominence of the relationship between religion and the arts. Despite Catholicism traditionally being the more visual and materially engaged Christian tradition, in the Dutch context it is remarkably how innovative and experimental artistic creativity
is predominantly engaged in Protestant contexts. In this paper, I explore three art projects that strongly engaged with Christianity, to contextualize the practices of Dutch Bible journallers. I look at the set of choir paintings by Egbert Modderman, commissioned by the Groningen Martini Church; the 2019 lent art project Art Stations of the Cross, displayed across various locations in Amsterdam; and the recent exhibition Through Matter of Time by Morena Bamberger in Stedelijk Museum Schiedam. Each of these projects demonstrate a different type of engagement with scripture through the arts, of which in turn traces can be found in Bible journalling practices. While the journalling practices take place in a different artistic and aesthetic discourse than the institutional art projects, bringing them together in an analytical framework sheds a more
elaborate and nuanced light on the enduring relation between Scripture and visual creativity in a secularized context like the Netherlands.

Period	27 Mar 2026
Event title	The New Illuminators: Women, Bible Journalling and the Interpretation of Scripture
Event type	Conference
Location	Dublin, IrelandShow on map