Remembering the Work of Judith Anderson
This article recently came to our attention. Judith was a wonderful visionary artist of archetypes of women and nature, who passed away in 2008. (Our thanks to Lauren Raine and Max Dashu for the reference.) The Encyclopedia of Women in World Religions: Faith and Culture Across History says that Judith “used womb/vagina imagery explicitly as devotional work dedicated to the goddess.”
In the Dark Speech of Praise and Birth: The Prints of Judith Anderson
by Catherine Madsen
Describing her process of printmaking, Judith said,
“The germ of the idea for a particular print develops over many months or sometimes years. Images from reading, dreams, relationships, pictures, plants and animals will gather and cluster until a beginning form for the print emerges. The main image grows and changes, often in surprising ways, during the long process of working on the plate, which may be several months. Only some time after a print is finished do I come to understand intuitively more about its origins and implications.” (from Art of the Print website)
Here as well is artist Alicia Blaze Hunsicker’s blog post about Judith.
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.
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