AW: How did you become an artist?
Jerry Holsopple: Curiosity, imagination, asking questions that were not supposed to be asked and never fitting in the boxes. I call it embracing the mystery.
AW: How did you come to teach photography and digital media at EMU?
JH: I was doing documentary production at MennoMedia and taught several classes at EMU on the side to help them offer some communication classes. These classes filled, and I offered more. The schedule of traveling all the time for production at MennoMedia made that difficult. EMU offered me a full-time position, which I accepted.
AW: Tell me about your recent work.
JH: I am touring at Bluffton University with a cinematic theater production of Bonhoeffer: Cell 92, created with my EMU theater colleague, Justin Poole. It has been performed around 30 times now.
Justin is the actor on stage. I am the cinematographer/DP who designed/edited everything that is on the screens. I also run all the tech during the show. I have programmed it to play three video streams and audio, and I run the lights with a wireless DMX.
The collaboration before this was U2 Romeo and Juliet, which featured 22 songs used with permission from U2. For that, Justin and I adapted Shakespeare and used the music to carry the story.
AW: You have done some extensive photography of Vilius Orvidas’ sculptures. Who is Orvidas, and why did you choose his work to photograph?
JH: Vilius Orvidas grew up in a family of gravestone carvers and during the Soviet occupation of Lithuania. For a brief period, he was part of the local Franciscan monastery but returned to the stones and carving. He died suddenly in the 1990s.
Orvidas’ sculptures are in an open-air museum. In an artist speech in 2023, I described Orvidas’ work this way: I was not prepared, when I arrived for my first visit twenty years ago. I encountered a place of mystery and faith. It is possible to approach the works as just something aesthetic in nature, and indeed they have a piercing beauty, but if you remain only focused on the artistic, I think you miss out on experiencing Vilius’ spirit that pervades the atmosphere.
I had questions during that first visit and they still are with me: Why were there so many sculptures of Mary, and why didn’t they look anything like the Mary found in western art or in the icon tradition? Why did he choose to put them where they faced the rain and wind? Why did he want us to be able to touch them?
After so many visits I offer some of my conclusions. I start by holding together two realities; Vilius was deeply spiritual, and he was living under the Soviet occupation. Mary was someone who understood loss, the loss of a son in particular, and as a person who lived with pain. She knew what it was to live under an oppressive regime, and she had one response to that: Hold on. She did not give in to despair, but held to hope, what I have come to call “stubborn faith.” Not a meek virgin, but a solid survivor of whatever came her way. Yes, tears run down her face — which always amaze me how he crafted those. She holds her heart because her connection is one of love, she holds onto the anchor, or the strength she gets from praying. Her face seems calm with a hint of joy. Don’t miss the skull she stands on in one sculpture almost hidden away in the middle of the farm. In the sculptures and the groupings, she has a connection to her son—as she stands in combination with the crosses or the lamb in the main altar.
AW: As I look through your website gallery photos, I notice a lot of light and shadow in your work. I see this in your photography of Orvidas’ sculptures, as well as in photos of ghettos and death camps. This is highlighted, I feel, in your infrared photos. Could you say more about light and shadow in your work?
JH: Without shadow there is no light. As I ponder some of the most important work over my career, much of it involves trauma and in particular survivors of trauma, who out of that brokenness have continued to be loving, hopeful and people of character who I admire. To photograph is to seek the traces of shadows and note how they shape the light, to find the patterns and lines that form a composition. Metaphorically it is to see the traces of darkness that make the light more beautiful.
I began to do Infrared photographs as a way to imagine what death camps and ghettos really held with the memories and lives of so many people who were killed. The lush green that the eye sees in these places seemed to cover over the deeper shadows that aren’t visible to the eye.
AW: I also see light playing a role in your glass and steel sculptures. When did you start working in sculpture?
JH: I became fascinated with the dalle de verre style of glass, where you work with inch thick glass and break it with a hammer and anvil. I began to experiment with it in 2009, but more recently I learned to weld steel so I can use the style with steel structures to create sculpture. The stacking method is an experiment that I am currently working with a lot. The fractured glass sends the light all over, and it is within the cracks where the light escapes the shadows.
AW: You say on your website that you want to tell stories through your work. What stories do you see yourself telling through your photographs and glass sculptures?
JH: When I say story, it doesn’t mean a linear story, but rather that the work conveys deeper connections to the human experience.
The glass sculptures were my response to digging into the archives and records of six Jews who were sent to the Riga (Latvia) Ghetto. I found the records; of where they lived, their jobs, what their income was, the route of the trains, about their families, visited where they were killed. The glass was to remember both their lives and the way they were broken, all while trying to still see the beauty.
The story with Orvidas is one of resilient people who survived the Soviet occupation and clung to what I call stubborn faith.
For me the most important stories I have told have been of survivors of sexual abuse, families who have found their way through the murder of a family member, lawyers fighting capital punishment and racism, peacemakers working at restoring justice, to name a few. Tell the stories that need to be told. Everyone has a story, and I try to create photographs that reveal a small part of the story.
I have cried and walked through dark places when working on these stories and the traces of that darkness never really leave your soul. If I hadn’t also found light there, I’m sure my life would be very different.
AW: What do you hope people will take away from your work?
JH: I want to encourage curiosity and questions, engagement with the world, not just a fearful dark world but one of hope grounded in joy. I have done a lot of dark subjects in my career, but I want viewers to see the way light keeps breaking through, to be inspired by survivors and to notice beauty in the wrinkles and shadows.