Self Portraits, Interiors

Sheela na gig, 2024, oil on canvas, 15.7 x 19.6 inches.

A while back, as I sorted through my old medical records, I came across a couple of stills from the videoscope used during my uterus surgery (where they removed some fibroid tissue and endometriosis threads). And I found them beautiful, not in the sense of a frilly, nice loveliness, but in a deeper, poignant way, as corporeal mess, with its darkness and mystery. Beauty that points to what the body, every body, can endure, to its resilience. That's where the beauty lies. And the strength.

I used them as basis for a self portrait as a ‘sheela na gig’ figure, adding the scars my body carries from cancer surgeries (thyroid and breast). Painting, I felt immersed into the knowledge of my body around those lived experiences but also into a deeper reservoir of intuition, resilience and collective ancestral memory that flows through and around us all. Tara Brach - in her podcast episodes July 4 and July 10, 2024- talks about 'embodied presence'. She discusses how that quality of presence allows us to be truly available for the other, present for the other and more open to an emphatic, compassionate being in the world, as sharing a common humanity as fleshed human beings. This in  opposition to living dissociated from our bodies, living in a virtual reality of thoughts and of 'othering', hostile divisoning the world suffers from these days. 

Last month I had a pre-op CT scan for a planned parathyroidectomy. Looking at those images also allow me to sink deeply into my body. I will no doubt paint based on those images as well.