Oil on panel, 2026.
A woman with golden skin wades chest-deep in dark water in the foreground, her fingers snaking through her long black hair. Behind her the last golden light slips behind the softly rolling shadowed hills. No moon hangs in the sky – instead, the sickle-shaped curve of a glowing rib bone floats above her.
The painting has many ancestors, including the tradition of the penitent Magdalene, a folkloric avatar of Jesus’ companion who has abandoned society to live out her days in the wilderness in mournful contemplation. I also returned to Leonor Fini’s Le Bout Du Monde (The End of the World), which depicts a woman partially submerged in dark water surrounded by bones and decaying plant matter beneath an apocalyptically red sky.
My Magdalene-like subject is lost in reverie beneath the sudden appearance of a disembodied floating rib bone. To whom does the rib belong? How did it make its way into its moonlike position? Is she doomed to be simply another Eve, fashioned from such a bone, or does her separation from this lineage liberate her from narratives of subordination and oppression?