Mother of God

The gravitational pull that made me arrive in these moments is the guiding force behind this work. It was much stronger than myself and through its presence, I knew I was protected.

What this series symbolizes to me has much evolved since the days of its conception. Yet what has remained constant is this: the Mother of God was never a peripheral figure. She was the origin. She was the earth before it was named, the darkness before light was called good, the body before the body was called sinful. Before word and world were held apart, she was present. Every culture that has ever existed has known her — under different names, in different forms. It was not time that erased her. It was fear. The fear of what could not be controlled, owned, or contained. And so she was edited out, slowly, quietly, until we forgot she had ever been there at all.

Women were once celebrated as an embodiment of the Great Mother, it was a time when the feminine was held in relation to the earth, when spirit and form were understood as inseparable. Through the ages, systems of belief and structure reshaped that perception, layering scripture over presence until presence itself became difficult to see. The patriarchy did not only erase her from our altars and texts — we were taught to erase her from ourselves. But the body remembers what the mind was made to forget.

This is not only history. It is something I had to excavate for myself, layer by layer. Transformation is a heartbreak. It is a dissolution of the old to fertilize the new. As an artist, I move within this terrain, this threshold, where dark and light, death and rebirth move as one continuous motion.

The making of this series was a two-year suspension on the edge of devotion and recklessness. I lifted my skirt, sat on bibles and dragged the cross — sometimes the only way back to the sacred is through the wound of what replaced it.

to understand religion 
is to understand reality

to learn

each lesson and its value
each tradition 
             and its harm

to know each flaw
in the words 
of dead 
men

to realize the difference 
between what is sold as spirit
and that which is 
               the centered soul

to see the separation 
      that lies in the gap between following                and                freedom
                                        the truth 
that is in the distance between
church                    and                  god

          to illuminate 
that teachings are only beneficial
         if they lead to willing transformation