Liz Seaton Proposal

Proposal:

Recently, I’ve finished 2 (maybe 3?) sculptures for Gaia exhibitions which were part of the past two Jersey City Studio Tours, that loosely referred to the ancient Greek mythic figures: the Three Fates. Last year for instance, I made a sculpture in-the-round called ‘Knitting Nancy’, which is a mixed media woman-figure built around a tube, with red knitting passing through her body. There was also a relief sculpture of a female half-figure, knitting on actual wooden needles. The knitting was dipped in wax. Since that show, I’ve made some revisions, and to me, the pieces are stronger.

These were the first works I’ve ever made that make reference to my own, rather intense involvement with needlecraft. And this year, I made a largish relief of a woman drastically shortening her dress with a pair of scissors, which was directly intended to be about ‘solicitation of the gaze’. However, I got the idea from another idea which has been incubating, about a piece that would complete a suite of sculptures that could be a ‘Three Fates’ series – maybe even a ‘Fates and Norns’ series.

For the residency, I would like to create a corner-installed relief in epoxy over wood, of a woman with fibers growing out of her head and body. She is cutting a handful of these fibers with an actual pair of taxidermy shears. Her skin will be painted roughly in oils. The fibers should probably be waxed.

My work has always been influenced by goddess figures of the Neolithic period: Cycladic figures, Ain Ghazal artifacts. However, when I was in grad school, I got a taste of the hostility that has developed in the art world toward feminist art that references ‘the goddess’. This has pushed me to research questions around the mind/body and the nature/culture split in Western philosophy — particularly how this all relates to ‘embodiment’ and ‘female identities’. I’m digging deeper, to find more concerning both the sources and justifications for my work.

Furthermore, in the midst of all this, I was invited to join a woman’s spirituality group, which now numbers 38. We gather eight times a year to celebrate solstices, equinoxes, and cross-quarter holidays. We sign up yearly for the responsibility to create a ritual that celebrates the divine feminine – whatever that means! – and our connection to the Earth and it’s cycles. This has been deeply satisfying work.

At present, my religious ideas remain unclear and radically uncertain, but I do prefer them to be this way. I thoroughly believe in doubt. Recently, I’ve been alternating drastically between literature celebrating the divine feminine and a thorough-going evolutionary, atheistic approach. I’ve read “The Cyborg Manifesto”: if God is dead, isn’t the Goddess dead, as well? I doubt I’m in a position to judge, but perhaps, I’ll continue to guess.

I still cherish the idea of the sacred, the idea of the Divine. I believe the freedom to ask questions about the nature of the feminine divine may turn out to be what is challenging, particularly in the face of resurgent patriarchal monotheisms.