MOTHER

MOTHER

Acrylic on canvas, 125x87cm, 2020

Some of us fetishize the past; others feel entitled to manipulate it to stake a claim on land inhabited by its indigenous population. We cherish memories that aren’t our own from a time we never experienced. We feel connected to objects we use as evidence of our existence, an imagined past, the past of ancestors, a past that exists only in cultural remnants, stories, and artifacts that survived the constructs of time and nation. This figure of Asherah, the Canaanite mother goddess, serves as a reminder of the people and tribes of the Canaanites, Philistines, and Edomites, inhabitants of the land alongside the twelve tribes of Israel. Though historians and archaeologists may understand Asherah as representing the divine feminine or, according to the Biblical interpretation, an essential member of the Canaanite pantheon, there is no dispute over her creation from the earth of the land of her origin. This large painting of a small artifact holds in it the eternal longing of returning physically and spiritually to our mother, to the source from which we came.