Baptismal Font 1937

Editor: So this is Harry Mann Waddell's "Baptismal Font," created in 1937. The medium is listed as drawing, possibly charcoal, or maybe oil pastel. There's a weight to the rendering that makes it feel really tactile. How do you interpret this work? Curator: Well, immediately I'm drawn to the symbolism of the baptismal font itself. Baptism marks a significant rite of passage, a cleansing, a rebirth, historically often intertwined with complex social controls around identity, belonging and exclusion. Editor: Controls? That’s a different perspective than I considered at first! Curator: Consider the date, 1937. The world teetering. How might religious institutions, represented by this font, have been implicated in social stratifications or perhaps offered solace amid upheaval? The heart and cross iconography speaks to both faith and perhaps a suffering, that transcends the purely religious. Do you see the echoes of colonial narratives here? Editor: Now that you mention it, the ornamentation *does* seem to borrow from various styles... Curator: Precisely! Waddell may be subtly critiquing the ways in which religious artifacts and rituals have been used – and continue to be used – to perpetuate power structures. Even the medium, a "drawing," seems to imply a study for a larger, possibly architectural, object – raising questions about function versus symbolic representation. What's *absent* is just as telling as what's *present*. Editor: That makes so much sense. I hadn't considered the loaded historical context of something seemingly simple like a baptismal font. Curator: Exactly! It's about unveiling the embedded narratives and power dynamics within even the most familiar symbols. Art encourages us to ask: Whose stories are amplified, and whose are silenced? Editor: This has totally reshaped my understanding; I will never look at a baptismal font the same way!