Our Lady was three years in the making.She originated in 1999 as a third and
culminating element in the cycle of work installed at St Anthony’s Catholic
Church in Portland Oregon.Those
pieces, a Stations of the Cross and a Resurrection, emphasized the end of
Jesus’ life and his triumph in the afterlife.The Virgin, eventually to be called Our Lady of Life, was
an attempt to round the cycle back to the beginning, to the conception of the
savior almost as a rebirth.Rather than an Annunciation, or a Madonna and Child, however, I was
drawn to the human story of the Mother of God, specifically the miracle of
one life coming to be within another.
I am
intensely interested in the very human condition and psychology of Mary at
this time.It cannot have been
an easy situation!A very young
girl, perhaps thirteen, unmarried, and yet in a family way.Her guardian and husband to be,
Joseph, protesting to the community that the child she carried was not his,
had yet to hold faith with her in her unlikely story.Were he to cast her out, her future,
and that of her child could only be grim.I imagine her at this time very ambivalent about this
little life she had found herself charged with.I see her walking in the wilderness of doubt and fear in
the early months of her pregnancy.It is impossible to see a way out.And then there is a movement.Mary stops and feels the baby in her womb reaching
out to touch her from within.She lays her hand against the palpitation.She feels for perhaps the first time the full presence of
this child, a miracle only a mother can know.Suddenly there is a feeling of great calm and
wonderment.Everything will be
all right, for her, for the child, and for all of humanity.She looks up from her own belly to
catch the eye of the first person she sees, smiling outward that secret
serene knowledge of faith.
The work was commissioned by Father
Michael Maslowsky in 2001 for installation in three locations in Oregon,
Assumption Village in St Johns, The Community Center in Corvallis, and the
site for which it was originally designed, the grotto at St Anthony’s Village
in Portland.
A note
about the face of Mary.I have
been asked repeatedly about whom I used as a model for the piece.The answer to that question is
somewhat complicated.Over the
course of the many years that it took this work to come to fruition I did a
great deal of studying from a number of models, always seeking that perfect
face and form, that I needed to represent the Virgin.I had a friend who was pregnant who
obliged me by letting me sketch her, as well as a woman of the most radiant
disposition who had contracted Aids as a teenager.There were women from Indonesia, Ireland, Czechoslovakia,
Mexico… So many and varied and yet each adding something crucial to the mix.
I came to realize that no one woman could fully manifest the Virgin, that she
was in fact in every woman.So I
began to seek as many varied forms as I could, so that they would merge into
a final form, which was both individual, and yet universal.
