REBEKAH PRYOR, author of Motherly, is an Australian writer, visual artist, and curator. Her book is an interdisciplinary study, presenting creative responses to “existing religious patterns and forms” and finding ways to “perforate their solid edges and enable their meanings to seep out”.
She sets her own art alongside a diverse collection of historical paintings and texts, including Fra Angelico and Julian of Norwich. She also discusses contemporary pieces, including work by the photographer Julie Rrap and the performance artist Motoi Yamamoto. These are offered, as Pryor explains, as a way of constructing a “fresh framing of the mother in philosophical and theological terms”, through her desire to engage with the “Word become flesh”.
Pryor tells us that her “experience of mothering children . . . has always been one of spiritual challenge and insight”. But, she says, there is an “absence of imagery that acknowledges the maternal body as a key site of encounter with the divine”. She addresses this gap through chapters on icons, laments, lullabies/carols, and sacred spaces.
Pryor is most persuasive when writing directly about materials. She helps us to understand the use of gold in devotional objects, its “durability, lustre and malleability”. She explains how she applies gold “sparingly and intentionally” on her own work, Triptych: a motherly body, seen in profile, bending to meet an unseen child. This multi-layered sculpture, made in clear acrylic, is one of several projects in which Pryor uses her own body as the template. She describes this work as “brought to light by light”.
In other works, her silhouette becomes multiplied in a repeating pattern as a fleur-de-lis, or outlined in salt as part of a mandala, traced on the floor — the process is inspired by Indian rangoli decorations, but also signifies “tears cried in love and lament”. Often in her practice, she incorporates ideas of homeliness or transparency, as a counterpoint to the rigid structures that she encounters in “mother church”.
Pryor addressed her concerns about “inherited . . . sometimes-impassable iconography” in her interventions in St Paul’s Cathedral, Melbourne. In 2015, she erected a portable “sacred canopy” made of linen tablecloths and bubblewrap within Butterfield’s vast Gothic structure. Her sheltering space encouraged contemplation of the incarnation: God dwelling with us, pitching his tent here.
Pryor grounds her art in theoretical texts, especially the writings of Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva. Sometimes, this is enlightening, as with Irigaray’s evocation of creation: “And so the clouds will cloud, the wind will wind, the summer will summer, etc. Each element of the real unfolds and reveals what it is made of.” But sometimes the theory seems opaque and at odds with the clarity of the visual art, the immediacy of saltiness or singing.
And the book ends with a series of questions, as Pryor acknowledges that her own attempts to disentangle the intricacies of art, motherhood, and spirituality are still a work-in-progress.
Dr Suzanne Fagence Cooper is a curator, lecturer, and writer. Her latest book, How We Might Live: At home with Jane and William Morris, is published by Quercus.
Motherly: Reimagining the maternal body in feminist theology and contemporary art
Rebekah Pryor
SCM Press £35
(9780334055969)
Church Times Bookshop £28