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In 2002, while living and painting in Oaxaca City, Mexico, I began
a series of paintings called Images of Faith, Power & Life:
Myth and the Divine Feminine. This work has been in some ways
a meditation on the continuum between the human and the divine,
and in others a search for an image of the divine feminine that
is relevant to contemporary life. As religion has recently become
more politicized in America, the series has expanded to encompass
the relationship between religion, politics and history as well.
The series was originally based on Oaxacan religious sculpture of
the Virgin Mary from the era of Spanish colonization. The images
of the feminine divine that I saw in Oaxaca were rendered in the
form of high art with the purpose of converting the indigenous peoples
of Mexico, and also of teaching a conquered people the useful principle
of martyrdom. It was a principle similarly useful in molding the
female character.
As one of many daughters in a long line of Catholic women, my initial
response to these exquisite icons was as palpable as an allergic
reaction: forceful rejection of something harmful to my particular
make-up. I had never seen the image of the Catholic deity in such
abundance, nor emulated with such reverence and literalness. Even
from a safe, ex-Catholic distance, it made me uncomfortable.
But the sculptures were also an artful element in a carefully crafted
environment of meditation, and they were undeniably worthy of contemplation
with their calm expressions of managed suffering. I had to ask myself
why this archetype made me so uncomfortable and further, what it
was that I wanted to see in an archetype of femaleness. I began
asking friends and acquaintances about the qualities they found
most striking in the women they deeply admired, at the same time
that I began seeking out other feminine mythologies. I realized
that while one of the key spiritual questions will always be that
of how to transcend suffering, nevertheless passivity was, for me,
a value of little relevance in modern life; especially in American
life. I have simply never had the luxury of passivity. I required
images representing a fuller experience, one that included evidence
of an active engagement with life, in addition to passive acceptance
of that which cannot be changed.
I began to combine images of the feminine divine from across cultures,
or sometimes merely across time. For example, early Mexican culture
viewed snakes as powerful forces of mostly good—life-givers,
rain-makers, fertility-bringers—and they were often associated
with female divinity. With the introduction of Catholicism, the
serpent became the embodiment of evil. Within the same culture,
the same symbol evolved into a profoundly different interpretation.
To address this work, I embraced the distinctive Mexican tradition
of syncretism. Syncretism is defined by the American Heritage Dictionary
as “reconciliation or fusion of differing systems of belief,
as in philosophy or religion, especially when success is partial
or the result is heterogeneous.” In the attempt to envision
something as monumental as an image of the divine feminine that
held real relevance for me, the syncretic imagery of Mexico with
its complex and imperfect melding of contradictory cultural components
became the foundation for this work.
I mixed this syncretic method with a study of mythology. The more
I read, the more I embraced the observation of the late scholar,
Joseph Campbell, that similar questions, themes, journeys of discovery,
maturity or transformation, and in fact the same images and symbols
occur across cultures. From the Tree of Life and Knowledge, to the
Virgin Birth, to the sacrifice of a hero for the betterment or salvation
of humankind, these myths persist. But they acquire their connotation—the
sense of what they are, their positive or negative charge—based
on the historical context in which they occur. I placed these themes
and images in unexpected relationships to round out passivity with
additional qualities of female power, thereby changing the lens
through which these familiar icons could be seen.
Current Work
When I returned to the US, as the country was briefly debating the
merits of and then entering into war in Iraq, I found the series
expanding to encompass current history as well as the period of
conquest that inspired the Oaxaca paintings. I am currently working
on the last of four pairs of Dolorosas (the grieving Virgin
Mary) which will be the Dolorosa 9/11 and the Iraqi
Dolorosa. These portraits represent the mourning faces of real
women who have lost loved ones to acts of war—history in the
making—just as Mary lost her son to a crucifixion rising from
the social and political conflicts of her era. These and other works
in progress depict an entangled relationship between politics and
religion, a history filled with heinous acts, often in the name
of religion, which elicit a need to believe in something higher
than the human being which could commit such heinous acts…a
complex, self-perpetuating, and apparently eternal cycle.
The newest works, the Coatlicues, are a melding of Christian and
indigenous Mexican mythologies about the mother of the gods. The
Mexican goddess of life and death, Coatlicue, also experienced a
virgin birth. One day while sweeping the temple at Coatepec (Snake
Mountain), a ball of feathers landed at her breast, mysteriously
impregnating her. When the gods, her previous children, angered
at their mother’s unexplained pregnancy, gathered to kill
her for her indiscretion, the war god Huitzilopochtli burst fully
formed from her womb, armed and war-painted with blue arms and legs,
and defended his mother’s life. A famous sculpture of Coatlicue,
who is distinguished by a skirt of serpents and a necklace of human
hands, hearts and skulls, can be seen in Mexico’s National
Museum of Anthropology. She was considered both a terrible figure,
with claw feet and hands for digging graves, and a nurturing one,
with breasts flaccid from nursing her many children—an Earth
goddess with both gentle and terrible aspects.
The Coatlicue paintings combine parallel Christian mythologies—that
of the Dolorosa, the Madonna at her most terrible moment following
the loss of her child, and that of the Virgin at the moment she
is chosen to conceive by mysterious means—with the Aztec Earth
Mother tradition. Both paintings are based on antique sculptures
found in Oaxacan churches, each beautifully executed in the viceregal
tradition. I mimicked that tradition as closely as possible, in
no way changing the attitudes or aspects of the original sculptures,
but simply adding to these passive models of femininity the symbolism
of Coatlicue, a goddess of great power, both nurturing and destructive,
and closely associated with the serpent. The Dolorosa Coatlicue’s
flowing robes are transformed into the skirt of serpents, her stomach
is filled with the hearts of men, her foundation a pile of bones,
and her face is distorted with the pain of witnessing and even advancing
death. The Inmaculada Coatlicue tenderly guards the ball of feathers
at her breast, her womb carrying a child with the blue arms and
legs of the Mexican war god, and the marks of crucifixion of the
Christian sacrificial lamb. She is worshipped by angels as she stands
upon a beautiful serpent who is her totem, not her enemy. Her expression
is as gentle, as accepting and humble as in the original sculpture.
The three most contemporary pieces, The Magdalenes, are
expressions of the politics of myth in real time. Each Magdalene
is a contemporary representation of Maria of Magdala, or Mary Magdalene,
a real woman who lived and was associated with Jesus of Nazareth.
For almost 1,400 years, she was characterized by the Catholic Church
as a prostitute. She was not. In the year 591, Pope Gregory the
Great, for reasons that are unclear, declared her as such. In Magdalene
I: The Prostitute, I associated the contemporary image of a
woman selling sex with possibly the most influential woman in Christianity,
thereby giving form to the pervasive but rarely visually-articulated
figure this historical act established and nurtured in the minds
of Christians for nearly a millennium and a half.
Magdalene II: The Chalice represents the view held by some
historians that Mary Magdalene was Jesus’ wife and the mother
of his children. By this account she was in fact the Holy Grail,
the Chalice that carried his seed. Children being corporeal, and
child-bearing being perhaps the ultimate and certainly most visceral
moment of a woman’s life, I represented this Magdalene
at the ripest point in pregnancy, just before giving birth.
The third Magdalene is based on the idea, uncovered in
the Book of Thomas from the relatively recently discovered Gnostic
Gospels, that Maria of Magdala was Jesus’ closest advisor
and confidante, possibly his financial backer, and the individual
he chose to carry on his teachings. Mary Magdalene was, by this
account, the preferred foundation, or rock, of his church going
forward. She was, simply, a friend.
Each of the Magdalenes also contains a symbol from mythology.
In the first, it is the apple, the turning point in Christian mythology
that brought shame into the world, made sex forbidden, and knowledge
something beyond the grasp of humankind. In the second, it is the
toothed vagina, or vagina dentada, an image that appears
across world mythologies, and which was co-opted by Freud as a symbol
of men’s fear of castration. I have encountered other interpretations
including an understanding of the life-changing consequences of
sex and a fear of death, of returning to the womb that originally
gave life, this time to be devoured in death. In most cases, it
seems to be a mythology about men’s fears. I applied the myth
to the vessel of those fears in the very moment that this symbolic
tunnel becomes, for her, the canal through which she will give birth.
Seen in relation to the life about to pass through these jagged
jaws, the toothed vagina takes on a completely other significance
than that popularized by Freud.
And finally the myth in the third Magdalene is that of
race. As the frequent victors in modern history, the Caucasian race
has more or less defined the color of divinity as “white.”
But the man who lived and became the founder of Christianity is
highly unlikely to have been the blue-eyed, fair-skinned lamb of
Western mythology. In this piece, I simply give the hand and arm
of The Rock’s friend a different ethnic background than that
presumed by Western culture.
To ensure the iconic nature of the Magdalene images, which
were much more contemporary than those of other work in the series,
I rendered them in sepia tones to provide a visual marker of historical
context, and placed them in a free-floating white to suggest their
existence in time and imagination.
Thus this series reinvents iconic imagery of the divine feminine
from both mythological and historical perspectives, challenging
existing images and offering them from a different viewpoint for
consideration. These paintings are the completed members of a larger
series in progress which explores various aspects of life, myth,
image, power and history.
— Susan “Montana” Murdoch
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