Mythologies, folk tales, and religion have turned darkness or blackness into something that is either evil or sinister. ALTER IMAGES II is a deliberate liberation of darkness from this vale of fears. I use darkness as the fecund source of beginnings, the womb-soil of all potential — a natural state instead of a projection of evil or wrong. The womb where animal and human life is formed, is dark, and beneath the soil where seeds germinate there is no light. The ebb and flow of life depends on darkness. As day and night are integral to our ability to live on this planet — so too are light and dark integral to our spiritual landscape.

When Christianity started to supplant the older religions of Europe and erected its great cathedrals on sites where shrines or temples to a pagan goddess had once stood, those goddesses were driven underground. It makes metaphoric sense then that, around the 12th century C.E., legends tell of how black madonnas were miraculously unearthed, often by a ploughing animal. Once buried or hidden, the earth goddess now re-emerged. The Church rationalized the dark madonna as having been blackened by candle smoke, but it is far more likely that she was black because she represented the dark, fecund potential of soil.