Category: Adam and Eve
Garden of Eden – The Last Apple
Pandora’s Box
The subject of this work, Pandora, like Eve, Lillith, Medusa, had her meaning and function inverted during the establishment of the patriarchal gods. Originally a persona of the earth goddess who rose from the earth with outstretched arms bringing life sustaining gifts of fruit and plants, she was rewritten, and like Eve became the source of misery and punishment for the human race.
The Bible
Then the Lord God made the man fall into a deep sleep and while he was sleeping he took out one of the man’s ribs and closed up the flesh. He formed a woman out of the rib and brought her to him. Then the man said, “At last here is one of my own kind.”
Genesis v, 22-23
Eve in the Box
The outside is an elaborate facade but Inside is a woman who is tied up in the dark. She can struggle and come out of the box to free herself.
Altar for Eve’s Chromosomes
Eve represents the first woman. I am honoring her genetic material with this mixed media sculpture. All women have descended from Eve’s chromosomes, which are the most fundamental, significant and potentially eternal part of our experience as humans.
Artistically, this work is related to a series of white wood wall sculptures I made during the late 1980’s. The objects I have added to the original box materials are symbolically related to women’s genetic and cultural heritage.
New Apple, New Manifesto
For a long time, the apple has been a metaphor of the female’s voice, of Eve’s voice, the voice that carried Adam to the supposed sin and expulsion from paradise. Woman has endured this sinful story for centuries. The same tale is connected to the traditional story of Pandora’s Box. Pandora’s curiosity leads her to open a box that the gods have forbidden. Her sentence is to find within all the evils of the world.
However, in this apple I present a new voice, one of many women who fight for their dignity. It is placed upon a stand and framed as an homage to the women who in the Asia, Africa, Europe, etc. struggle against practices that have put them in positions that are submissive, second class, and at times inhumane.
This new apple is a new manifesto, that of the creative woman who has had to fight for her space and had to change old meanings.