The whole collection together at the Art Sanctuary.
This Month I entered my Wunderkammers (Curiosity Cabinets) into the Art Sanctuary’s Divine Feminine Artist residency and gratefully was chosen as a finalist. I was very interested in the theme of the exhibition as it very much aligned with my ceramic collection I had already been working on for years before.
When I began my collection of curiosty cabinets I had in mind a deeply personal story of womanhood, motherhood and beyond and Its contradiction of beauty and brutality, relic and body, sacred and ordinary.
My collection is an ever evolving set of works layered between thematic territories.
The rough sketches and ideas process.
“The life giver” of “fertility and creation” (The seedpod cocooning from a fragile thread on a branch dangling above a bed of moss and its ancestral lineage, with its sprouts of three (Mother, grandmother, daughter),pure white porcelain sprouts, holdfast by a strong foundation rooting itself to the centre, nestled in the belly of a feminine body, nurturing, round and full with its dark warm centre and earthy textured exterior.
“The blood, the cycles and the pain”. The brutality of womanhood. A bright white porcelain uterus standing strong in a new womb attached with its off white, cracked, stretched, exaggerated, fused and ugly form of a personal journey with Endometriosis. In this space, grief grows and its painful. But the outside is strong and beautiful. A vessel holding a painful story balanced by a forced silence and endurance.
“The offering and the alter”. A porcelain hand presenting a metal clay ring engraved with Shiva Shakti symbol of divine union, the joining of the masculine and feminine energies, consciousness and creation. The hand sits upon an ornate alter with a backdrop of embroidered rock cairns on linen representing the ancient earth, woven together in keeping the balance of it all. Womanhood is both landscape and monument, something that carries history, creates life, holds deep pain and continues to regenerate.
One of the Cabinets displaying the porcelain cocoon
The heart of my Wunderkmmers explores the idea of something ancient, knowing, wild, complicated, powerful and sometimes uncomfortable. The divine feminine is not simply soft, nurturing and beautiful, but it also carries loss, blood, intuition, rage, regeneration and the extraordinary ability to create life/art from darkness.
Im sure this project will be ongoing throughout my life. I feel like it is ever evolving and I will expand and elaborate its story as I need to, but for now this is how she is. She is currently on display at the Art Sanctuary if you would like to visit.