the WOMB IS A SAFE PLACE/ THE WOMB IS NOT HOSTILE / I EMBODY MY POWER AS CREATOR, 2021
performance photography | giclee print on archival watercolor paper | 18”x 38” | 2021 | edition 4 + 1 AP
This artwork is included in the exhibition, Body Autonomy, presented by Latela Curatorial & Artsy
October 10 - November 20, 2022
Body Autonomy is a group exhibition on Artsy featuring 24 women and non-binary artists nationwide. It includes artworks that address the overturning of Roe versus Wade and recent attacks on non-male bodies, trans rights, reproductive rights, general themes of displacement, labor, pleasure and public health for all child-bearing bodies.
A vibrant nexus for contemporary art, the Third Annual See Support Collect Initiative is a curated 6-week, intersectional placemaking and gap-filling initiative that focus on collectorship of art by women and non-binary artists. This initiative is fueled by Latela Curatorial. All exhibition artworks are available for purchase.
Collecting art is a joyful experience, which is also a direct investment to living artists and current culture. Today, in the year 2022, women artists’ sales still make up only 2% of the global market (source: National Museum of Women in the Arts).
ABOUT THE ARTWORK
The womb is a safe place
the womb is not hostile
I embody my power as Creator
This artwork was born from a mystical experience I had at Catalina Island on Mother’s Day in 2021. Mystical experiences are not easily put into words. Sometimes, they can be communicated in art. I humbly do my best to translate here, and in the artwork presented.
I was called to journey and sit in ceremony with the land and ocean. My ancestors came through and guided me through an experience I can only describe as giving birth to the after afterbirth of my own birth trauma, and that of the mothers before me. I viscerally felt the fear of giving birth that the women of my maternal bloodline felt before, during, and after their transition from woman to the role and identity of Mother. This experience expanded out into a picture of how the collective experience of Motherhood has become distorted over generations of epigenetic inheritance and societal conditioning, and how deep and pervasive the grief of the Mother Wound is present in the collective unconscious.
I was shown that women were taught to fear their own innate power to create life, to fear their own body as a sacred vessel, and to deny their most fundamental and sacred magic of receiving (conceiving) and giving life. I viscerally felt the pain and suffering of so many generations of women taught to reprogram love as sacrifice instead of sovereignty, and to carry a child as to carry a burden rather than a joy.
As the Mother learned to become a victim in culturally engendered circumstances, she grew further alienated from her body, her own womb, her own infinite power of creation. As the Mother learned she was not safe and not supported in the task (obligation) of bearing a child, the Womb itself became not safe, and the Motherline became distorted.
As I felt the legacy of feminine pain twist, contort, and howl this energetic cycle out of my body, I felt such a deep honoring and connection to my own fears, especially present as a woman in her mid-forties, not yet a mother herself.
The combination of what I was shown and told through my body was transmuted into what I can only describe as an ancestral healing: a clearing to allow my own vessel to embrace my female body and innate power as a creator, as a mother of worlds born and to yet be born.
This artwork’s title is a code to unlock and restore the original blueprint of motherhood and creation founded in Love. The images are portals to remember the innate connection we all share with the Mother’s body as Earth, as sacred birthplace for humanity’s experience as sovereign creators.
With or without a womb, we are all born as powerful Creators of our own lives.
- Kathryn Cornelius, 2022