Ribs (2025)
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The mixed media pieces comprising , ‘Ribs’, are part of an ongoing conceptual investigation in conversation with a 2025 photo-portraiture series titled 'Ribs,’ as well as an original poem, ‘An Ode to Dog and Bone.’ This body of work alludes to my experience growing up as a young woman in a fundamentalist religious environment, questioning purity culture, favorable guilt, silence/submission, and what I’ve come to refer to as “divinely ordained inadequacy".
This notion of inadequacy was explained to me in Sunday school as the wages of sin brought about by a woman, and thus this idea of ownership and/or belonging to the man as retribution for such, represented in this work by Adams rib from which Eve was formed. Confronting this pain shared by women as a consequence of Eve’s sin, raises the question of whether the blame was justly placed. Thus, ‘Which One?’ references the last line of ‘An Ode to Dog and Bone,’ confronting this guilt and subservience as a consequence of Eve’s existence, parodying the implied, and positioning the female figure as a reliquary vessel for Adams rib, the body as a temple, ornate and beautiful, built for and from man.
Inspired by an original poem, ‘An Ode to Dog and Bone’ is driven by religious symbolism, appropriating Adam’s rib from which Eve was formed as an extended metaphor for the subservience of women as seen from a Biblical standpoint.
This piece draws from several stylistic features of Proto-Renaissance art, reimagining the characteristic gilded background, halo, and framing to imitate the panel of an altarpiece, signifying spirituality and sanctity. Similarly as observed in Catholic reliquary boxes, there are bones presented as relics in the same fashion as that of a canonized saint, however, displaying the rib of Adam alongside the skeletal remains of a fox, in reference to an Aesops fable. The motif of the fox and the grapes are then repositioned in this piece as a parable for the reaching and longing that are seemingly inseparable from religiosity as a woman.
