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2 DECADES +

MALE EFFIGIES


'CEREMONIAL FIGURES'
1985 Mixed media on paper 97 x 112cm

A personal process of removing and excavating through the layers of religious dogma that obscured the view beyond the biblical “beginning” brought me to these figures. I was trying to find a benign essence of masculinity that anteceded the traditional male-dominated social structure that shaped my childhood understanding of gender.To me the headless and armless figures “removed” the rule of intellect and the grasp of ownership and allowed me to imagine a masculine strength that resides in the torso: the heart, the belly, the groin - an earthy fecund humanity, endless like time and timeless like Stonehenge - the essence that remains after all superfluity has weathered away.

That these essences of masculinity would eventually lead me to images of the sacred female seems almost poetic in hindsight: row upon row of male effigies guarding the path to the sacred opening - the great mother - goddess. For me, there is gender balance in this idea. Masculine power, instead of its historic/biblical role of deposing the mother goddess, is transformed into silent sentinels along a path back into the deep recesses of time. My imagination allowed me to follow this path and to picture the primal deity as a woman (with a little help from the writings of Carl Jung and Jungians like Esther Harding, Marion Woodman and Joseph Campbell).

I am fascinated by costume and body markings that symbolically yoke body and spirit. For thousands and thousands of years in different parts of the earth ceremony, rite and ritual served to hold together various groups of people around their particular ideas of and relationship to deity. I imagine echoes of long-forgotten, time-muted songs and chants having come to rest like a thin layer of dust in the base levels of the unconscious.




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