2018 | Stations of the Cross

Et cor tuum de me

This work attempts to mirror the experience of the Mother; of Jesus, of my mother, and of my relationships as a mother. I imagine the experience of Mary meeting her son tortured, abused, and defiled on the way to his crucifixion, and read the phrase (attributed to Mary) 'A cry from the core of me'. This phrase is the stimulus. It guides the process, making it personal and yet universal.

A table cloth, deconstructed, seemed appropriate: sitting around a table was the 'core' of our family each evening just as Stations of the Cross is the 'core' of Easter. Pulling threads refers to what is lost, the patterns of a life and, the threads not pulled - what remains. However, in stripping away threads that were once part of a whole, another space and meaning appeared. This reminds me of the mystery of love, that nothing lessens it; love can only really grow. As in the absence of loved ones, we apprehend more deeply what they meant to us, and we to them. Seen as an act of sacrifice, Jesus' death in my work then may be perceived as a symbol of everyday domestic events intersecting here with a tumultuous event for all Creation.

This simple and repetitive work of severing single threads, aroused in me the unknowable; exposing what is absent but implicit in the act of creation. Between the threads. I became silent, seeing what was once whole become greater for its lessness.

Thinking this way also made me look to my own mother, her long journey with Alzheimer's, and what was lost and gained in our relationship. In the tangles of threads both missing and present I saw resemblances of brain synapses during dementia; interrupted, impaired, ineffective. In the spaces is the story, in the absence is the presence.

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