Jim Hodges and the Essential Lightness of Being
I cannot cause light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam - Annie Dillard
Jim Hodges works in light. Not the kind that falls from the sky, but the kind that lives in things — caught in glass, stitched through silk, coaxed from the shadow of ordinary matter. He makes art the way one might pray: with patience, with reverence, without haste or conclusion. His work doesn’t explain itself. It waits for you to look until you see.
The Weight of the World
He begins with what the world gives him — denim, mirrors, metal, flowers that never die. He collects what’s been left behind: torn fabric, crushed glass, chains too heavy to lift. From these remains, he makes something that breathes. It is a small miracle, this turning of heaviness into air.
In With the Wind (1991), he stitched scraps of denim into a great blue field. It hangs like the horizon — wide, worn, and restless. A man could look at it and think of work, or water, or the long afternoon sky. The cloth carries everything we’ve ever known about endurance. Hodges leaves it there — nothing explained, nothing softened. The weight is part of the grace.
Between God and the World
Hodges doesn’t speak of God in bold letters, but His shadow moves through the work. The themes are ancient: reconciliation, mercy, redemption. He finds them not in the church or the pulpit, but in the simple act of seeing. In Every Touch (1995–98), thousands of silk flowers are joined by delicate threads, hanging like a net of color and air. It could be a shroud or a curtain, or a sky seen through tears. It is about the body and what connects one body to another. Each stitch is a word. Each seam is a prayer.
There’s nothing sentimental about it. The flowers do not pretend to live. They only remind us that someone once believed in beauty strong enough to make it last. Hodges’ grace is not the grace that erases sorrow. It’s the kind that holds sorrow until it becomes bearable.
Light Made Heavy, Heavy Made Light
Hodges works with opposites like a fisherman works a line — with quiet care, a kind of muscle prayer. His materials tell two stories at once. Steel chains form airy webs. Mirrors scatter color like sunlight on water. Gold wraps stone until the hard thing gleams.
In Untitled (one day it all comes true), he takes shards of glass and lets them find their own order. They sit together like fragments of a broken stained-glass window. The reflected light makes them whole again, or close enough. You see your face in the glass — scattered, rearranged. The work says, This too is you. You are broken, but not beyond repair.
Hodges knows the math of redemption: one wound plus light equals beauty. He knows, too, that heaviness is not the enemy. We must carry it for a time; then, one day, it lifts. He does not rush the lifting.
The Holy Ordinary
What Hodges touches becomes almost holy, though he’d never call it that. He draws our eyes to the small and the discarded — napkins, scarves, scraps, shadows. A Diary of Flowers, drawn on paper napkins, carries the quiet weight of gratitude. The napkin, a thing meant to be stained and thrown away, becomes instead a field for attention. Line by line, he draws a world inside a square of cheap paper. That act — slow, deliberate, almost invisible — is what makes the work holy.
There is something of Dillard in this — her way of seeing God in a willow leaf or a mosquito’s wing. But Hodges strips the language from it, leaves only the object and the silence it carries. The silence is the point. It tells you where to stand and how to breathe.
The Light That Remains
All through his work runs a single thought: that light is another name for mercy. You sense it in the glimmer of glass, in the shimmer of gold leaf, in a wall of mirrors turning the room into a choir of reflections. The light does not ask to be noticed. It waits until you do.
Hodges’ work gives that light to others. You step into one of his installations, and the mirror takes you in. You see yourself among the fragments — scattered, partial, infinitely many. It’s unsettling at first, then calm. The art forgives you for being incomplete. It whispers that all things, seen in light, belong.
A Practice of Resurrection
In the studio, Hodges rebuilds what has fallen apart. He takes the overlooked, the broken, and the forgotten, and offers them back to the world changed — not fixed, just made visible again. This is his gospel: repair through attention. He treats every scrap with a kind of mercy the modern world has forgotten.
There is nothing abstract about this. To mend a thing, you must touch it. You must see it as it is. Hodges works that way — as if art were a form of forgiveness made real by the hands.
The Essential Lightness of Being
The phrase fits him. He understands weight but doesn’t live under it. In his work, heaviness and joy coexist, as they do in life. A chain and a flower carry the same spirit. A mirror holds both beauty and ruin. Everything belongs.
He teaches us that lightness does not mean escape. It means bearing what is ours to bear — the sorrow, the faith, the daily acts of attention — until what was heavy grows transparent. To live lightly is not to live without pain; it is to walk through pain and emerge shimmering.
That is what Jim Hodges does. He stays with the materials until the light finds them. He stays with the world until it reveals its holiness. His art is an act of staying awake — to the fragile, the fallen, and the blessed. In that steadfast seeing, he gives us back the weight of grace.
