Whaihanga Mihinare | Anglican Creativity

Anglican Creativity

A variety of scholars, across a range of fields, have argued that creativity—including visual arts, music, dance and language—is one of the defining characteristics of the human species.^[1] It follows, then, that within the Hāhi Mihinare | Anglican Church of Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia, creativity has manifested in many ways since adherents of that faith arrived on Aotearoa’s shores.

We are initially planning several projects which share the creative contributions of Anglicans to churches and to communities within which they stand.

Church buildings are full of history, encoded not only in the architecture and construction of the structure, but in the interior and exterior decorations and the uses of these spaces by the people who work and worship there.

The decoration of churches is often artistic (and historic, narrative, communal), but art made by Anglicans, whether it explicitly reflects upon matters of faith or not, of course exists outside of churches as well. One art practice which has frequently included people working simultaneously within the Anglican Church and outside it is musical composition and performance: some musicians have written or performed worship songs in both church and popular environments; some musicians have written or performed hymns or worship songs in church contexts and have separately written more secular music.

The stories we are working on in this section will be multi-layered and multi-media, comprising visual, audio and other material components. In addition to exploring creativity and art-making, these stories are also a way into exploring community—involving both the makers of art pieces and those who use, view, and engage with those pieces of art regularly, and in doing so add layers of meaning of their own.

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Footnotes

¹ This kind of assertion is repeated across many books and articles, written by scholars working in a huge range of fields, e.g. Gillian M. Morriss-Kay, ‘The Evolution of Human Artistic Creativity’, Journal of Anatomy 216, no.2 (2010), 158–176, who works in the Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics at Oxford. The literary scholar Brian Boyd in On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction (Harvard University Press; Belknap Press, 2009) has explored the topic too. Psychologists, evolutionary theorists, anthropologists, and many other scholars have turned their attention to the origins and functions of human creativity.