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HONORABLE MENTION-Artist, Susan Spaniol
Drawing Collage 24"x20" This
piece, inspired by a contemporary photograph, seeks to counter the previous
imagery by depicting woman as maintaining strength, dignity, and beauty despite
life’s afflictions. The photograph was a
full-page, color image in the New York
Times Magazine of the actress Lynn Redgrave immediately following her
masectomy. In this picture, she
unashamedly bares her chest, with its blood-filled receptacles and medical
binding. Through this prominent
portrayal, Redgrave proudly contradicts cultural norms with visual evidence
that women maintain beauty and power despite aging and illness.
Once
upon a time, and long, long ago, the goddess Yakshi was one the earliest and
most respected deities of the indigenous peoples of India. Strong and sensual, her mythology survived
for centuries as the fertile custodian of earth’s abundance, summoning
ancestral respect for feminine strength and fecundity. My series of goddess pictures seeks to
juxtapose ancient reverence with the story of female subordination and
transcendence through the ages. The Goddess
series was developed from my graphite drawing of a sandstone torso of Yakshi
carved in Central India at the time Christ was
born. Fascinated by the power of this
image, I photocopied it a number of times, and with each successive copy the
image continued to ‘break down’ and dissolve.
I used various stages of these images as collage, adding other graphic
media, to construct the series. For me,
the visual dissolution of the image can be read as the story of cultural failures
in the legal, physical, and emotional treatment of women—from early history to
postmodern times. Each drawing in the
series provides a chapter of the story of women’s subordination and
transcendence through the ages.
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