2 DECADES +
MALE EFFIGIES
 'CEREMONIAL FIGURES' 1985 Mixed media on paper 97 x 112cm
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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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