Motherly: Reimagining the maternal body in feminist theology and contemporary art

By Rebekah Pryor

How can contemporary art reimagine the body of the mother in relation to a feminist Christian conception of the divine? And, at the level of culture, what might be the implications of the maternal body imaged as ordinary, multiple, generative and divine?

Following movements in her own visual art practice, and traversing the discourses of feminist theory, contemporary art and philosophy of religion, artist and scholar Rebekah Pryor considers philosopher Luce Irigaray’s key notions of sexuate difference, the sensible transcendental and “love at work in thinking” on the way to proposing alternate artistic and theological motifs of the maternal body and the divine for our time.

Five new motifs emerge, challenging iconographic conventions and proposing an expanded vision of the mother and the divine in feminist theology and contemporary art.

• Language: English
• Publisher: SCM Press
• Release date: Jan 31, 2022
• ISBN: 9780334055983

Rebekah Pryor

Rebekah Pryor is a visual artist and curator, and a researcher at the University of Divinity, Australia.

Book preview

Motherly

Motherly

Reimagining the Maternal Body in Feminist Theology and Contemporary Art

Rebekah Pryor

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© Rebekah Pryor 2022

Published in 2022 by SCM Press

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The author has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the Author of this Work

Scripture quotations, unless otherwise marked, are from New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicized Edition, copyright © 1989, 1995 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Scripture quotations marked (RSV) are from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1946, 1952 and 1971 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-0-334-05596-9

Typeset by Regent Typesetting

Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd

For mothers and others whose bodies do this work of love.

Contents

Figures

Acknowledgements

1. An Ordinary Story

2. Performing the Icon

3. Lament

4. Sacred Canopy

5. Lullaby

6. Horizon

Figures

1. Rebekah Pryor, Triptych, 2014, acrylic, gold leaf, steel, 25 × 20 × 5cm © Rebekah Pryor

2. Marina Abramović, Portrait with Golden Mask, fine art pigment print, 2009 © Marina Abramović. VG BildKunst/Copyright Agency, 2021. Courtesy of the Marina Abramović Archives

3. Mother of God of Tenderness of Vladimir (Eleousa). Moscow, Tretyakov State Gallery © 2021. Photo: Scala, Florence

4. Fragment of fresco with the Madonna, a prophet and a star. Rome, Catacombs of Priscilla © 2021. Photo: Scala, Florence

5. Rebekah Pryor, Performing the Icon (Choreographic Notes 1–12) (detail 1), 2015, paper collage, 30 × 42cm © Rebekah Pryor

6. Rebekah Pryor, Performing the Icon (Choreographic Notes 1–12) (detail 2), 2015, paper collage, 30 × 42cm © Rebekah Pryor

7. Rebekah Pryor, Performing the Icon (Choreographic Notes 1–12) (detail 3), 2015, paper collage, 30 × 42cm © Rebekah Pryor

8. Yulyurlu Lorna Fencer Napurrurla, Grief, 1997, synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 277 × 181.5cm © estate of the artist licensed by Aboriginal Artists Agency Ltd. Image courtesy of Deutscher and Hackett

9. Yulyurlu Lorna Fencer Napurrurla, Yarla, 1997, synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 277 × 181.5cm © estate of the artist licensed by Aboriginal Artists Agency Ltd. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Purchased through The Art Foundation of Victoria with the assistance of Mobil Oil Australia Limited, Fellow, 1998 (1998.257). Photo: NGV, Narelle Wilson

10. Michelangelo (Buonarroti, Michelangelo 1475–1564), Pietà. Vatican, St Peter’s Basilica © 2021. Photo: Scala, Florence

11. Motoi Yamamoto, Labyrinth, 2010, salt installation, Kunst-Station, St Peter’s Church, Cologne, Germany © Motoi Yamamoto. Photo: Stefan Worring. Used with permission

12. Rebekah Pryor, Continuous Narrative (installation view), 2015, table salt, 5.7 × 7.5m, VCA Artspace, Melbourne © Rebekah Pryor

13. Rebekah Pryor, Continuous Narrative (detail), 2015, table salt on gallery floor, 5.7 × 7.5m © Rebekah Pryor

14. Rebekah Pryor, 12 years 5 months 6 days (installation detail), 2016, table salt, approx. 3m diameter, Yarra Sculpture Gallery, Abbotsford © Rebekah Pryor

15. Rebekah Pryor, 12 years 5 months 6 days (detail 3, after 13 days), 2016 © Rebekah Pryor

16. Rebekah Pryor, Saltcellars, 2017, table salt, dimensions variable © Rebekah Pryor

17. Angelico, Fra (1387–1455), Noli Me Tangere. Florence, Museo di San Marco © 2021. Photo: Scala, Florence – courtesy of the Ministero Beni e Att. Culturali e del Turismo

18. Rebekah Pryor, Lament, 2016, digital photograph, pigment on archival cotton rag, 79 × 110cm © Rebekah Pryor

19. Rebekah Pryor, Portable Cathedral, 2015, mixed media, 240 × 120 × 300cm © Rebekah Pryor

20. Rebekah Pryor, Portable Cathedral (detail, with view to St Paul’s Cathedral ceiling), 2015 © Rebekah Pryor

21. Rebekah Pryor, Fleur de Lis (detail), 2015, digitally printed wallpaper, 2 × 2m © Rebekah Pryor

22 . Rebekah Pryor, Fleur de Lis (installation view to Chapel of the Ascension), 2015 © Rebekah Pryor

23. Rebekah Pryor, Dear Mr Butterfield (interior installation detail), 2015, felt and cardboard, dimensions variable © Rebekah Pryor

24. Rebekah Pryor, Dear Mr Butterfield (exterior installation detail), 2015, felt and cardboard, dimensions variable © Rebekah Pryor

25. Rebekah Pryor, Dear Mr Butterfield (exterior installation view 2, Flinders Street, Melbourne), 2015 © Rebekah Pryor

26. Julie Rrap, Christ, 1984, cibachrome photograph, 194.5 × 104.7 cm (image and sheet) © Julie Rrap/Copyright Agency, 2021. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Michell Endowment, 1984 (DC15-1984). Photo: NGV, Narelle Wilson

27. Rebekah Pryor, Genealogy (video still), 2015, digital video (looped), 1 min 50 secs © Rebekah Pryor

28. Rebekah Pryor, Lullaby (video still), 2016, digital video (looped), 2 mins 49 secs © Rebekah Pryor

29. Rebekah Pryor, Plane, 2017, mixed media on cotton rag, 108 × 68cm © Rebekah Pryor

30. Rebekah Pryor, Horizon, 2017, mixed media on cotton rag, 108 × 165cm © Rebekah Pryor

Acknowledgements

Motherly emerges from a particular place with a long and continuous cultural and spiritual history that remembers both the mother and the earth from which she and we are born. And so, in celebration of this, I acknowledge the Boonwurrung and Woiwurrung peoples of the Kulin Nation of Australia on/with/from whose unceded ancestral lands I live and work.

Interdisciplinary practice-led work only succeeds with the support and encouragement of a great number of generous, thinking people. I am indebted to Luce Irigaray whose rich scholarship, as well as time and guidance shared in Bristol in 2016, have helped shape my capacity to think and be, and to the numerous other wise scholars and artists who have similarly buoyed my spirit and inspired my work. My deep thanks to Elizabeth Presa whose own art practice, scholarship and direction at the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Ideas have been a great source of inspiration, and to Louise Burchill who has generously shared her vast philosophical knowledge and capacity and brought much energy and insight to my own explorations. Thank you to fellow artists and scholars, especially Melissa O’Rourke, Ellen Koshland, Michael Needham, Grace Pundyk, Matthew Engert, and to brilliant colleagues in the Centre for Ideas and the Australian Collaborators in Feminist Theologies. Your collective encouragement and critique along the way are greatly appreciated.

Artworks by other artists – Marina Abramović, Julie Rrap, Yulyurlu Lorna Fencer Napurrurla, Motoi Yamamoto and others among them – have played a significant role in informing and challenging my own art practice. Fortunately, and with thanks to Motoi Yamamoto, Marina Abramović Archives, Yulyurlu Lorna Fencer Napurrurla’s estate, National Gallery of Victoria, Deutscher and Hackett, Aboriginal Artists Agency, Copyright Agency and Scala, images of some of these works appear in this book.

Motherly presents a body of work developed over several years. It has, at different stages, been supported by research grants from the Australian Government, the University of Melbourne and the University of Divinity (Australia). Some of this writing has appeared in fragments elsewhere along the way: parts of my discussion in Chapter 4 first appeared in my original 2015 Cathedral exhibition catalogue text and are reprinted here with the permission of my conversation partner and co-author, artist Michael Needham; and parts of Chapter 5’s discussion first appeared in my article titled ‘Lullaby: Births, Deaths and Narratives of Hope’ in MDPI’s Religions journal (2020) and are included here under the Creative Commons Attribution licence of MDPI.

I am thankful for the help of the St Paul’s Cathedral Melbourne team, including the Very Revd Dr Andreas Lowe, Megan Nelson and Dorothea Rowse, who shared their time, space and resources (including access to the cathedral’s William Butterfield archive) in 2015. Thank you also to the Rt Revd Dr Brad Billings and others at the Bishop Perry Institute, the staff at Heritage Hill in Dandenong for their residency support, and my community at the Anglican Parish of Mount Eliza.

Love and thanks to my parents, Annette and Mark, each of whose manner of love nourishes me and helps me grow; and to those close ones who have been motherly, accompanying, challenging and sustaining me along the way, especially Andrew Pryor, Jude Blake, Sharon Burton, Jill Miglietti, Andrew Miglietti, Lynn Pryor, Michelle Trebilcock, Cathryn McKinney and Clare Shearman.

My deepest gratitude is to my family: you have inspired this work and loved me enough to allow space for it to flourish. May my love to you feel equally expansive.

1. An Ordinary Story

This is a story of a body: a maternal body, to be precise. It is an ordinary story in many ways and one that opens out in what might best be described in liturgical terms as Ordinary Time – those days and weeks between extraordinary events: the birth of a child; an epiphany; a death; a miraculous, life-changing event; a spiritual encounter. As resonant as I hope this story is for you, it begins as my own.

Births and deaths and other life-changing events always overflow the limits of their extraordinariness, to leak out into ordinary time and affect everything thereafter. Under that kind of flooding pressure, even those most sacred and certain things can become inundated or, sometimes, completely overwhelmed. The precise details of the series of events that led me here are, I think, so ordinary in their extraordinariness that they needn’t rate a mention, except to say that they demanded that I radically rethink much of what I had come to understand about God and church and faith over decades. These events (the ones about which I needn’t speak) began to spark questions in me regarding the place of the body – rather, of bodies – in the religion that had helped form me. In response and through my art practice, I became preoccupied with the value of contemporary images of ordinary motherly bodies and their potential as religious icons. This all gave rise to one key question: given a visual culture in which images of the Virgin Mary have long influenced our imagining of the mother and the divine, can contemporary images of the maternal body in action function as icons? Images made and inherited from Orthodox and Catholic traditions seemed to me to figure Mary as static, silent and vessel-like: a woman made divine through relation to her son, and present as a role model for all mothers, all women. My question emerged from my own growing ambivalence towards the Christian (Anglican) Church of which I am a part – an institution that seemed to me too often to perpetuate visions of ‘God’ and ‘love’ that merely sustained patriarchal doctrines and ecclesiastic factions. Where was I in this? As a woman, artist, Christian and also as a mother, I could not separate my female-identified body from my experience of spiritual revelation nor any thinking about divinity. And yet my own religion – a religion centred on the fleshy revelation of God in Christ – appeared incapable of acknowledging it and visually (and, to a great extent, linguistically) representing it in ways that were intelligible and true to me as a whole person. My subjecthood seemed somehow blanketed by a symbolic order that bore little to no trace of my real gendered and sexuate body, not to mention the thought and speech I can proffer because of it. I had come to find that my participation – and to some degree, my own sense of faith – inside the tradition was being mediated by a language (in word and art) not my own and a culture predicated on a singular, unified and ocular imaginary of the male body.

Words and other materials

In the studio, I sought to address this lack by generating a proliferation of new images that, according to me, better represented the maternal body in relation-with an other and offered a fresh framing of the mother in philosophical and theological terms. My experience as an artist had already heightened my awareness of the inadequacies of maternal imagery in contemporary Christian culture. Indeed, my practice was the means by which I had begun to question (both in words and other materials) the religious culture with which I was so familiar. The aesthetic and symbolic lack I perceived in it required a creative, culturally productive response. It called for a practice-led approach that would generate ‘praxical knowledge’, in artist and art theorist Barbara Bolt’s terms, knowledge that ‘involves a reflexive knowing that imbricates and follows on from handling’, and in turn, via an exegetical gesture, has the ‘potential to effect movement’.¹ In order to address what was at once a theoretical, artistic, personal and cultural inquiry, this approach demanded that the creative and exegetical outcomes emerge from a ‘self-conscious, rational and reflective’ framework.² In the studio, I used a bricolage of intersecting texts, theoretical disciplines, materials and artistic modes to create a range of visual, installation and performance works that functioned as remnants and products of my approach. The artistic ‘handling’ of material (to borrow Bolt’s term) was also in keeping with my interest in and engagement with the theology of the incarnation: of ‘Word’ become ‘flesh’, in biblical terms.³

Given the nature of my question, philosopher Luce Irigaray’s theory of sexuate difference and her understandings of the theological implications of woman as mother and mystic, along with her notion of the ‘sensible transcendental’, were crucial in illuminating and contextualizing my thinking. An interdisciplinary array of other thinking also informed the work, including: medieval iconography, devotion and mystical writing (especially the writing of Julian of Norwich); continental philosophy (in addition to Luce Irigaray: Marie-José Mondzain, Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes); contemporary art (including performance and installation art examples, and critical analyses of the image by Judith Butler and others); architecture (especially relating to Gothic and Gothic Revival periods, as well