ABSTRACT
The sublime can be a powerful and transformative experience. Through a simple encounter with a picture or a painting that evokes the sublime, our understanding of the world can be stirred, disturbed, and challenged, and we may be opened to new and different ways of being. This suggests that the sublime may have strong pedagogical potential, especially with young people. Pedagogy may be defined as distinguishing between what is good and what is bad, damaging, or less appropriate in our ways of interacting and dealing with children and youth. It is the differentiation between what supports and facilitates youth’s development toward maturity and full self-responsibility and what may not (van Manen, 2015). In other words, pedagogy describes the ethics of the relation between adults and young people. It is, therefore, important to know what possible experiences may be in the best interest of young people. Are experiences of sublimity positive? Or are they potentially problematic and damaging? Parents introduce their children to experiences that they believe will expand
their children’s world and encourage their personal growth. For instance, a father may encourage his son to have a wilderness adventure in the hope of sparking a spiritual encounter with nature. Or, a mother may leave something for her child that may elicit a similar response. Such was the case for Sheppard when, as a child, her mother unobtrusively left a large book of great artists for her to find. It is one of the images from this book that Sheppard encounters later in life in the London gallery. Sheppard recalls the impact of her mother’s action:
She had laid it on a table that I was responsible for dusting. From the first moment that I picked it up, that book became mine. I looked at it for hours, staring at one picture then the next, feeling wonderment at knowing that there is something else, something
more to life. I remember sitting in the quiet of the afternoon, my mom in the kitchen and I snuggled in a chair, looking at the paintings, thinking, “Who did these? Who thinks like this? What does this mean? And how does this fit in the world because this is not at all similar to the world that I am living in?” The images were so unusual, their colours so vivid, such a stark contrast to my white, Christian, middle class, small town life where nothing much happened. Those pictures were otherwise to life as I knew it: they were exciting, strange, and different. And they made me want to find out more. I realized that there had to be other books and pictures like that, so I started looking in the local library for more things that were different like that. I went in search of them, of this “something else,” of a different kind of life. What those pictures revealed became part of the future story I had about my life. That “something” was going to be my life.
