MYTH IN MIND, 2021
20”x24,”oil on partially gesso primed wood board
This piece is one that speaks to the process of creating personal myth. Creating personal myth, I think is often an unconscious but innate human ability, as one might take images from their everyday life and superimposes those images in place of things not yet seen or understood, like something heard of from a far off land, or from a fairly tale, or myth if you have it. The black egg in the woman’s throat is imagery taken from Filipino folklore about witches told to me as a girl. These particular filipino witches pass on their curse of witch-hood by giving a family member, usually a daughter, the black egg that lives within their throat. The recipient in turn consumes the egg themselves and inherits the curse as to relieve their kin who can finally pass away. As a child I always wondered what sort of a bird lived inside the egg, I imagined it was something dark and otherworldly. Later in life, living in the state of Vermont I encountered one particular lake inhabiting bird that fit this imagined unearthliness: the loon. The mountain lake scene adjacent to the bird is a memory from a trip to the Philippines when I was a girl, but could be mistaken for a lake in the mountains of Vermont or some other North American landscape as the fog across the mountain top creates the illusion of snow.
