The Little Hours

Here I play with the iconic characters of the Christian story. One of the myths of the origin of Christ is that he was conceived through the ear at the Annunciation. Reproductively speaking then, the Virgin’s role becomes that of sublime incubator for the Word, and the law of the Father. This begs the question - what kind of transformative effect does this have on her and her own future? My grandmother was a white Russian, these were the least respected of the Shanghai residents at that time. Russian women worked as dance hall girls and other 'entertainers'. Her marriage to older merchant class man would have redeemed her.
And for the father, who as a character in my mythology of the Hours, becomes a rather non specific figure, a third party, the mothers Other, for whom the child becomes an object of discourse and regard.
This is a particularly female reading of the maternal from a family archive. It is also about being a stranger, an outsider.
Although the era of religion is past, its semiotic/symbolic structures, images of the split self, of desire, of narcissism, of abjection and of paternal and maternal functions have been a force in my reordering of these archive images and resonate strongly within the play of self and other around which my work is engaged.

‘When I think of religion at all, I feel as if I would like to found an order for those who cannot believe: the Confraternity of the Faithless, one might call it, where on an altar, on which no taper burned, a priest, in whose heart peace had no dwelling, might celebrate with unblessed bread and a chalice empty of wine. Everything to be true must become a religion. And agnosticism should have its ritual no less than faith.’ Oscar Wilde