Speaking to members of her own congregation at the UUCMC Sunday Morning Dialog, Virginia talked about her 25-year long life as an artist, accompanied by slides of her clay tile work and poems.

Virginia averred that until preparing for this talk she had not looked back on her life as an artist "in a while."

In her artist's statement, she wrote of art as a home, also a journey, as travel, as space and that it enabled her to be a story teller.  After she discovered clay in high school, she found it the way she could use it to overcome her shyness and to communicate with others.

"Art was my first religion after leaving my birth religion," she says. She studied, then taught sculpture and pottery before receiving her Master of Divinity degree from Meadville Lombard Theological School in 2001 and becoming a minister.

Recurrent themes appearing in her work with tiles and poetry are resurrection, judgment, memory, patience and waiting, caring and brokenness.

Her last show of her work at a New York gallery demonstrated a reconciliation between art and religion. Artists, she feels, have a role as social critics, standing on the margins of society, pointing out what they see from there.