Found Art: Discovering Beauty in Foreign Places - Hardcover

Found Art is a memoir of the year author Leeana Tankersley lived in the Middle East with her Navy SEAL husband during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. After a whirlwind courtship, a move across the world, and the unexpectedly difficult re-entry from a year overseas, Leeana finds her life (and her soul) has been changed forever.With an artist’s eye, Tankersley uses each chapter to piece together moments and memories from her journey—a handwritten note from Kuwait, a braid of fringe from a Persian rug, an original poem, a bit of basting thread, a swatch of black silk from a borrowed abaya, a mesquite leaf, a Navy SEAL trident, a receipt from the Russian-Georgian restaurant on Louisiana Street—to create a work of unexpected beauty.Found art emerges ... a literary collage created from salvaged stories of loss, hope, and belief that just might change your soul, too.

Found Art is about seeing a certain beauty in an object, a beauty that isn't inherently there on first glance. It requires vision, a look beyond what is to what could be. Navigating a relationship with God in the midst of chaos, confusion, and disappointment can be disorienting. And though glimpses of God appear here and there, more often readers face the frustrating inability to find him in the midst of any of it. But what if, like a found artist, God were busy creating something enduring from the scraps and the cast-offs? What if art is seen, not in spite of, but because of, the raw materials? Through the lens of Ecclesiastes 3, Leeana Tankersley shows readers that sometimes they must let something die if they are ever going to be born again. Sometimes they must fight to keep their roots planted while life is trying desperately to uproot them. Sometimes they must mourn as grief is the only passage out of their pain. And sometimes they must go to war while in the very next moment they long for a day when peace is possible without it. Any one of these scraps might be a discarded item, but collaged together, they become something entirely different. Art emerges from the carefully collaged odds and ends. God takes the unlikely moments of our lives and pieces them together into something of beauty and worth.