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A mysterious, ghostly image can be seen on the old, brown rose petal that Mark Burchick shows me. The image is of a crucifix, and, to the right, there appears to be a flower in bloom that may be part of a bouquet. The tiny image is even clearer when viewed with a magnifying glass. It resembles a photo negative, somewhat similar to the far larger and fainter image of the man on the Shroud of Turin.
How could someone produce such an image on a rose petal? That is just one of the mysteries that confronts visitors in “Felt Presence,” an art installation at Towson University’s Holtzmann MFA Gallery.
Can miracles open our minds?
Miracles are strange things because we are confronted with events and objects that are seemingly at odds with our everyday experience. Such things question our understanding of reality – and thus can provoke a range of reactions in a person who is confronted by them, including indifference, anger, puzzlement ... and a sense of wonder.
It is the latter two emotions that seem to drive Mark Burchick in his artistic and scholarly explorations of the miraculous. An award-winning filmmaker and interdisciplinary artist, Burchick thinks that the questions that miracles provoke in us can help give us a broader perspective on reality and open our minds to possibilities we had not considered before.
Burchick has posted a statement at the beginning of the installation:
“As you enter this space, events will unfold which may seem impossible. I have no intention of misleading you or deceiving you. These things happened.”
AI and a dancing sun
I first encountered Mark Burchick’s work through a paper he co-authored with professor of religious studies Diana Walsh Pasulka (American Cosmic, Encounters). “Choreographing Shadows” looked at AI-generated imagery in relation to matters of belief. In addition to addressing the ethics and trustworthiness of such imagery, the paper explored the possibility that AI might be used to help us better comprehend the strange nature of the miraculous, using as examples the visions of St. Francis of Assisi, and Fatima’s Miracle of the Sun. The article inspired me to try my own experiment, which I previously wrote about for Aleteia.
The Miracle of the Sun is one of the events featured in Burchick’s current installation. There are photos on display of the crowd who were present on October 13, 1917, printed from digital copies of the original negatives. The photos were taken by Judah Bento Rush, who traveled to Fatima that day to record the events for a secular newspaper. In the photos, men, women, and children stare up at the sky with expressions that suggest mixtures of awe, fear, and perplexity.
When I mention that skeptics might claim that the photos were staged after the fact, Burchick points to studies that looked for repeated images of the same people in the crowd.
“Judah Bento Rush was probably shooting at least a photograph per minute, dragging the tripod through the mud because it had rained earlier, swapping out glass plate negatives in the field. It’s amazing how quickly he would have been working to get the images that all record people looking at the sun. So, although we don’t have images of the miracle itself, we believe that the images seem to suggest that these images were taken concurrently during the miracle.”
Questions and more questions
I nod -- except then I notice that there is a photo of the “dancing” sun hanging among the other photos. It cannot possibly be authentic. And one of the photographs of the crowd doesn’t look quite right either. It shows flower petals falling from the sky onto the crowd (an event reported by some onlookers), but the hands of one of the figures are off. Some of the facial features also look ever so slightly elongated, a typical flaw of AI imagery. With a smile, Burchick admits he generated those two images using the AI engine Midjourney.
Looking around the gallery, I begin to realize that “Felt Presences” -- being an artistic look at miracles -- is going to challenge my critical eye and put my preconceptions to the test. On the far wall there is a reliquary in a case. The label beneath it says that it contains a third-class relic of St. Therese of Lisieux. Is it authentic or a recreation? And another case contains a glass plate negative showing the three child visionaries of Fatima.
As Burchick points out, photons would have bounced off the three children and imprinted their images upon the glass plate. Doesn’t that, in a sense, make a photographic plate of a saint a relic? What makes a relic a relic? My head is suddenly swimming with questions.
A starting point for exploration
That is one of the purposes of the installation, Burchick explains. Most people who enter his gallery have thought little about religious matters and probably consider miracles and relics to be the stuff of fairy tales, not actual realities to be confronted.
“Assuming that you’re not familiar with the Fatima narrative, for instance, you’re going to come in here and look at these images and think to yourself: Okay, some of this looks real. Some of this is challenging my understanding of how the world works. And then you’re in this position of having to question everything. My hope is that if any of these questions are being elicited in people, they’re going to leave here wanting to do their own research on the story of what happened on this day. Who were these children? And this for me is a starting point for somebody to explore and have their own journey.”
Rose petals
That brings us back to the rose petal Burchick showed me at the start of the exhibit. According to him, it is a family heirloom that belonged to his grandmother and dates from the 1930s. The image of the crucifix and flower are undeniably visible on the petal from both sides. But how the image got there is a mystery. Two distinct family stories have been passed down, each telling of miraculous events, but Burchick has no way of knowing which one (if either) is the “true” story. His grandmother died in 2000, when he was seven years old, and Mark Burchick did not know about the strange rose petal then to ask her.
Skeptical that the image was truly miraculous, he made many attempts to recreate similar phenomena on his own rose petals. After hundreds of attempts, Burchick has managed to produce some faint imagery, but nothing nearly as clear or photographic in quality as the image on the rose petal that belonged to his grandmother.
“I set about to try to disprove it and came up with more reasons why there are interesting qualities about it that I can’t explain, and that to me is just indicative of the entire journey of faith, certainly in my case.”
Some of the petals with “false” images are laid out for visitors to touch and examine under magnifying glasses. For Burchick, such tactile experiences play an important part in coming to terms with the miraculous and with faith itself.
A hands-on believer
Burchick grew up as a Catholic and says that he has experienced “what feel like genuinely supernatural experiences in my life that look in the direction of being God-given.” Long a fan of the work of Michael O’Neill, known to many as The Miracle Hunter, Burchick believes that trying to understand miracles and relics can help us answer another burning question: “What does it mean to be Catholic in today’s Church, in today’s world?”
“Hearing stories of events like Fatima, weighed against some of my personal experiences, I’ve leaned more into the direction of wanting to dissect the tradition, get into the weeds, play with the material and make sense of it to myself. To better understand what is the lived experience of being Catholic as opposed to just, you know, a theoretical involvement – sitting in a church, but not experiencing it.”
“Felt Presence” will continue at Towson University’s Holtzman MFA Gallery through December 7. You can find out more about the installation, his family's possibly miraculous rose petal, and Mark Burchick’s many other projects on his website, which he updates frequently.
