Skip to content
Helen Seiver
  • Home
  • About
    • About Helen
    • Sitemap
  • Current and Recent Works
    • 2023 | Emergences - Vasse Felix
    • 2022 | Sculpture at Bathers - Papirri
    • 2022 | Esperance book project
    • 2022 | Royal Perth Art Prize
    • 2022 | Jury Prize - Port Hedland
    • 2022 | South West Art Now
    • 2021 | Dwelling Rituals
    • 2021 | (t)ruth
    • 2020 | Bunbury Fringe Festival
    • 2020 | South Western Times Survey
    • 2020 | Sculpture@Bathers
    • 2019 | Fibre - Holmes a Court Gallery
    • 2019 | Wildflower State
    • 2019 | Alternative Archive
    • 2019 | Bunbury Biennale
    • 2018 | Are we there yet?
    • 2018 | Stations of the Cross
    • 2009-2017 | Gross Domestic Product
    • 2017 | The Spaces Between Us - Adding absence
    • 2016 | The Survey - Cloud Seed Express
  • Older Works
    • 2012 | Melville Sculpture Walk
    • 2012 | Marsh Art
    • 2012 | Castaways Sculpture Exhibition
    • 2015-14 | Inflorescience Series
    • 2014 | @home series
    • 2012 | Aurum
    • 2014 | Minnawarra Art Award
    • 2012 | Ladders
    • 2014 | Sculpture by the Sea Cottesloe
    • 2013 | Strangers in my Palace
    • 2011 | Birdland
    • 2013 | Melville Sculpture Walk
    • 2013 | Sculpture@Bathers
    • 2011 | Mt Narryer
    • 2013 | Sticks in my Mind
    • 2012 | Sculpture by the Sea Cottesloe
    • 2010 | Yarloop Townscape Sculptures
    • 2010 | Home is where...
    • 2010 | Old Mallokup Bridge
    • 2010 | Cnr Boonooloo and Heath
    • 2009 | Now we lie in it
    • 2009 | Whose Flag?
    • 2008 | Space and Place
    • 2008 | It's Child's Play
    • 2008 | Fringe Focus
    • 2008 | River Art
    • 2008 | Endangered Species
    • 2007 | Outside is the Real Place
    • 2007 | Bunbury Bienalle
    • 2006 | Translating Broken Space
    • 2006 | Fact or Fiction
    • 2008 | Standing Safe
    • 2005 | Sight Analysis
    • 2004 | 60 Gladstone Ave
    • Virginia Cunningham
      • Spin Cycle
      • 2009 | Gross Domestic Product
      • Cunning Stunts
  • Media
    • Media

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.

© 2014-2021 Helen Seiver | PO Box 95, Capel, Western Australia 6271 |  Email

footer-facebook-social-social-media.svg