Scholar Salon with Simone Clunie

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Wednesday July 29, 2020
3 pm Eastern Daylight time

The Representation of Goddess Imagery
in Feminist Art

For millennia, the goddess figure made its way through the mythologies of First Peoples and through women’s histories. In the Western traditions of major (masculinist) Abrahamic religions, the archetype of a/the goddess has become eclipsed by a solo male god head. In the rising of the Second Wave of the western feminist movement of the 60s in (New World) countries like the USA and the United Kingdom, female artists started looking at a female create-tress, inspire by various traditional goddess mythologies, as the first source of worship. The iconography of the goddess also became another way to peel away the layers of patriarchal thought (and religion) and to interpret female embodiment and energy as a priori site of/for creation.  Artists began to pay reverence to the spirit/creation and its interconnectedness to/within nature. They introduce the goddess presence through re-confirming pagan based practices like Wicca and Dianic witchcraft, the calling on of the African traditions of Yoruba and Vodun, and reframing Christian tradition within a woman’s theology.

As a ceramic artist, my work has been influenced by this time and train of thought, and moving through a trajectory of the social influences of the 1960s and onwards that informed the feminist (art historical) thinking of various female artists, I will look at how goddess mythologies have informed individual/specific works of Ana Mendieta (Cuba/USA), AfraShe Asungi (USA), Monica Sjoo (Sweden/UK), Mary Beth Edelson (USA), Robyn Kahukiwa, (Aotearoa/New Zealand), Mayumi Oda (Japan/USA), Yolanda Lopez (Mexico/USA), Sutapa Biswas (India/UK), Nancy Spero (USA), and Vivian Lynn (Aotearoa/New Zealand).

Simone Clunie is an artist who works as a librarian and lives in Pennsylvania. Moving to the USA from Jamaica in the mid-eighties she found out she had an affinity for clay and earned a BFA in the Visual Arts from Florida International University in Miami. A feminist conceptual framework is the impetus for the work she focuses on, primarily using the female body as a metaphoric container for/of magic and women’s mythology.