Sunday, April 28, 2013

Rebecca Soudant

 "in this panel my water is breaking"   Rebecca Soudant
Sailing with John, cotton embroidery thread on canvas by Rebecca Soudant
Oh Rebecca.  Your hand embroidered tapestry, filled with colour and narrative, metaphor and beauty, time and power...communicates so much tenderness and pain.  
This tapestry panel is the first thing one sees upon entering the group exhibit I am Water, currently up at the steam museum in Kingston Ontario until May 2.
 Entirely covered with hand stitching, this is the second tapestry the artist has created about childbirth.
The earlier piece, "A tapestry of birth" is a thirty five foot documentation of the artist's first pregnancy .  For more photos and information about the artist,  click here. 

I believe I'm directly contradicting the way human beings are represented in our society.  
I think the universal is the male.  
And so in my deliberately turning this around and trying to universalize the female - 
-the rites of passage for women- 
birth, puberty, child-birth, death
would become the universal.  
I tried to challenge myself to look at the world as I wanted to,
as a woman artist, 
realizing the complexities of doing so because the world isn't really that way.
Nancy Spero
above photo of Rebecca by Asad Chishti,  

4 comments:

Penny Berens said...

Oh, my goodness me....such a special piece.

Unknown said...

thank you so much for pointing this artist out to me, Judy. Also, the Nancy Spero quote because it has been too long since I looked at/read anything she has created. -sus

mansuetude said...

Fantastic! Love the panel with the bats, and the man "holding water" especially.

A woman who takes control over her own story, is a powerful joy.

Montse Llamas said...

Interesting work. It reminds me of Matisse, mostly "A tapestry of birth", though the artistic concept of both artists is completely different.