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Lament
'Woman, Why Are You Weeping?' (2016) draws on motifs of the garden and the body to explore the tension of being between the event of the resurrection and Jesus's promised return. The work references the first garden of creation and the tomb garden in which Mary Magdalene encountered Jesus on that first day of the week (John 20). Salt is used as a symbol of tears and preservation, while dawn light and the horizon of regrowth suggest the possibility of 'a new heaven and a new earth' in which death, dying, mourning and crying will be no more (Revelation 21:1-5). In the moment of Jesus's question, the woman's posture and expression draws us in to ponder the realities of this garden's liminal space.
Lament (2016) further explores these themes, and this time offers a motif of woman as mother. In a landscape changed by cycles of dying and rising, the mother embodies experiences of joy and grief, expanded here by the symbolic nature of salt.
Rebekah Pryor, April 2016
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