I conveniently saved each stage of my WIP concepts for this one so I thought it'd be a good showcase of my collage-making process, starting from the crude concept mock-up and progressing in waves of refinement. the foundational things I knew going into this piece were that a) it was going to include symbols for Kali, Yemoja, Ran, Pele & Aphrodite, and b) it was going to evoke Eight of Swords imagery
some quotes that inspired this piece:
In the beginning … was a very female sea. For two-and-a-half billion years on earth, all life-forms floated in the womb-like environment of the planetary ocean—nourished and protected by its fluid chemicals, rocked by the lunar-tidal rhythms. Charles Darwin believed the menstrual cycle originated here, organically echoing the moon-pulse of the sea. And, because this longest period of life's time on earth was dominated by marine forms reproducing parthenogenetically, he concluded that the female principle was primordial. In the beginning, life did not gestate within the body of any creature, but within the ocean womb containing all organic life. There were no specialized sex organs; rather, a generalized female existence reproduced itself within the female body of the sea.
Before more complex life forms could develop and move onto land, it was necessary to miniaturize the oceanic environment, to reproduce it on a small and mobile scale. Soft, moist eggs deposited on dry ground and exposed to air would die; life could not move beyond the water-hugging amphibian stage. In the course of evolution, the ocean—the protective and nourishing space, the amniotic fluids, even the lunar-tidal rhythm—was transferred into the individual female body.
—Monica Sjöö & Barbara Mor, "The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth"
This thought — of the endless weaving of identity and difference, of life and death, of growth and decay — is what the figure of the goddess has always expressed to me. Not some facile image of unbroken romantic harmony, or a hippyish projection wrought by flipping from denigration to idealization. The great mother is not some pure, virginal Mary or a simple, undifferentiated horn of bounty and beneficence. She is boundary crossing, the semipermeable membrane, and the endless interweaving of identity, difference and relation. She is the matrix and the web, the pulling and unpulling of threads, the opening, closing and spinning of the spiral dance. She is the Furies and she is Kāli, force of mutable material darkness, goddess of time, dancing with her necklace of skulls, presiding over all of creation and destruction.
—Jane Clare Jones, "The Cyborg Vs. The Goddess"
Historically, hunting is a male (pre-)occupation. "Organized predatory violence has always been a male monopoly, whether practiced against game animals or those enemy humans defined as not-men (and hence also a kind of prey animal)." When hunting becomes unnecessary then male sports develop—fox hunts, bull fighting, and fishing—using for weapons phallic symbols such as guns, arrows, fishing poles and swords.
—Carol Adams, "The Oedible Complex: Feminism and Vegetarianism" (The Lesbian Reader)
