Sue Coe

British-American Printmaker Sue Coe is no friend of the institutional church. Yet, her passionate, pitiless art of social protest often draws on religious motifs and resonates with a sense of the sacred. This provocatively titled 1991 etching in defense of animal welfare juxtaposes the image of a single sheep in green pastures with millions in the holding pens of a meat-packing plant, posing the question of just what has become of the Good Shepherd of biblical lore who could rescue his flock from such mechanized slaughter. Whatever the artist’s original intention, this powerful image of smoking chimney stacks and anonymous masses awaiting death evokes more than just the evils of factory farming. We might ask, ourselves, as well, where a Loving God was during the ultimate horror of the Holocaust or when countless other crimes against the whole created cosmos were committed. There is no ultimately satisfying answer--except to suggest we should look for God, incarnate in Jesus Christ, among the victims of wars, religious crusades, ethnic cleansing, death camps, torture chambers, slaughter houses, reseach laboratories, radiative fall-out, toxic waste spills, and other forms of death-dealing that periodically affict the planet. In the familiar words of the Hymn to the Suffering Servant in Isaiah 53:7 (KJV), considered to be a foreshadowing of the Passion of Christ:“He is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth.” Where is the Good Shepherd? He can be found standing in silent solidarity with his long-suffering flock, offering his very life as the final sacrifice to end all forms of violence against God's good creation. (John Kohan)