The Pity
...The Pity
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16” x 9”
Mixed media: wildebeest, raccoon skull, wasp nest, silver
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​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​This piece is a depiction of Mother Nature, upon her knees as she cradles her own dying body.
Her legs are formed from two deeply curved Wildebeest horns - separated from their skull and then placed close together. From one horn, a small remnant of the cranium protrudes upwards, and forms her open torso.
A small water buffalo horn is her single left arm, stretched across her chest, as she holds back her organs that are spilling out from her visceral cavity. Exposed, on her right side, is a single breast, formed from a large, voluptuous and eroded limpet shell. By lifting off her protective arm, and gently removing her lovely breast, her organs are revealed.
Her lungs richly hued in dark, raw sienna tones, appear in a state of deflation. Formed from the nasal passages of a slaughtered lamb, we can almost feel them as they breathe out a last faint plea for resurrection. Threaded between the lungs, her esophagus and stomach, devised of dried and twisted roots, wind down and attach to a small red dried berry, for her pancreas, and a little dark grey mud wasp cocoon, for her spleen.
Across her stomach is a Brazil nut shell that is her liver, and hidden beneath it, a tiny pearl forms her gallbladder. Below, we can see her bowel - a tangle of dark and light, brown dry roots that are slipping away from her cavity. Off to one side, her bladder - a small peanut shell with a tiny tube of silver at one end - protrudes.
One by one, her organs can be removed, until finally, the dark sterling silver kidneys and ureters, attached to that little peanut bladder, are revealed.
Above them, deep within her chest, her heart is suspended. It appears as a tiny wasp nest hanging from delicate branches of slender, twisted roots that form its vessels.
The body of the heart is constructed from a tiny nut shell, adorned in soft grey wasp paper and sterling silver.
It opens, and inside, the hexagonal cells of the wasp nest are depicted with silver with tiny garnet cabochons.
Off to one corner of her distorted body, a small door hides the entrance to her reproductive cavity. It is the foot of a conch - with brown, ridged striations and hidden dark hues of yellow and orange and red, that can only be observed when it is held up to the light.
On its reverse, it is adorned with fine, swirling strands of silver filigree amidst tiny topaz and garnet spheres.
Looking inside her reproductive cavity, we glimpse the bright orange teeth of a muskrat skull.
It is her uterus, with twisting sterling silver fallopian tubes attached to the hearing cochlea ovaries, and a silver filigree door on the top.
Behind this tiny and ornate door, lies the delicate exoskeleton of a bee, as the fertility of the earth now lies dead in her womb.
Looking back up to the top of her open form, there lies a tumorous lump, where her head once protruded.
Instead an ethereal head, with a simple and featureless, bisected face made from bone, and a mound of hair formed from the crumbled dark grey and brown cells of a wasp nest, leans from outside of her body, as she looks upon herself with compassion and pity... la Pieta…..
But perhaps she is also all of us, looking with pity and sorrow upon the injustice and cruelty perpetrated within the body of all humanity.
And perhaps she is each and every one of us on our solitary journeys to find a little compassion for our own painful wounds, as we hold ourselves in and together.
Emerging from the remains of life and finality - from bones and shells and the delicate last vestiges of wasps and bees, she is beautiful and serene.
But perhaps it is amidst finality, when we contemplate what remains, that we may find our redemption.
Perhaps it is when we let the experience of beauty direct our our focus, that we may begin to glimpse truth, and clarity, and fill ourselves with wonder, and with hope.
Photo Credits: Marina Dempster