Description
Collection of the Artist
This small accordian style one-of-a-kind artist book is a meditation on the Divine Mother in her many guises. Sacred Prostitute is made from an acid free Mexican bark paper called amate with a variety of other media including wood veneer, bits of paper, Catholic holy cards, fortune cookie fortunes, dictionary cut outs, india ink, gold leaf, pencil, glue and acrylic medium.
It is comprised of 6 double sided pages and housed in a folded amate paper container tied with twine. It is 6 double sided pages using my familiar iconography of armless torso, cave threshold, birds, ovary/fallopian tubes (in itself a very birdlike, winglike form), the hands in prayer and several images of "bird woman".
The book has various sayings in it such as: "it is better to have a hen tomorrow than an egg today", "Memory Walk -- you will always get what you want through your charm and personality".
"Precious, predictable", "hys-te-ria his-'ter-e-a, -'tir- n, from Gk hysterikos, fr. hystera womb; fr. the former notion that hysteric women were suffering from disturbances of the womb".
On the gold page pictured above it says "Babel" as in the tower of Babel, "your luck has completely changed today" and on the cover, it is titled Stigmata, Sacred Prostitute.
The piece flows along using the above described images and text inscribing a progression of flights of fancy around the etymology of more words about women, and the ways in which women have been perceived throughout many cultures. The piece explores the many ways the wisdom of the Divine becomes distorted through theories of "biological imperatives", causing the disassociation in our contemporary cultures from the world of the imagination and the Divine within us. The book focuses on how in our current civilization, women have been limited to a very confining and male-directed set of roles.
Read more about my work in my artist statement, Creating Spiritual Art for the New Millenium and resume.