Nuns

On the typescript of lectures notes I composed in the early 1980s, I wrote that my goal was “to develop a female figure sexual without being available.” I also wrote “I am drawn to the icon which is centered, totemic, narcissistic and sacrificial, phallic and matriarchal rather than to the competitive patricide of iconoclasm. The art world that I live in values the latter.” The work “begins with the figure, is refound in nature—trees, stones, sand flats and skate egg cases – which reflects back into the figure. I have tried by subject, form and material to create a female presence that comments on “femininity,” a notion that I find intriguing, elusive, alien and oppressive.”

In my childhood the building next door to mine was a convent school, and in the 1950s the nuns wore full traditional robes. Always walking in small groups, never alone, they were notable and fascinating. Gradually their attire modernized. By the time I was a teenager they wore the same basic uniform my private school required: grey skirt, navy blue sweater, white blouse and small wimple head covering. In later years, unmarried, childless, and dedicated to my work as the trace I would leave of myself, I sometimes joked that I was a nun for art.

The most recent work of this triad of figures is what is left of all that drama about what it means to live in a female body, when you awake in a darkened room from open heart surgery, no more uniforms and identities beyond the most basic human condition of being in a body.