Continental Drift

Continental Drift, or Her Unbound Bodies Divine uses as its source of reference an icon of the goddess Isis whose cult expanded from Egypt to the whole Mediterranean during Greco-Roman times. The fresco, dating from the 4th Century CE, shows the goddess breast-feeding her son Horus and belongs to the broader figurative category called Isis Lactans that expanded in the Mediterranean until AD 400. This imagery is subsequently appropriated by Christianity: representations of the nursing Madonna, or Maria Lactans, are the last example of bare-breasted divinities in the Western world. After the 17th Century, the image of the breast is divided from the divine and censored as a remnant of pagan origins. The artist re-interprets the fresco through the process of dissecting and reassembling the image. The gestures thus attain another semiology, of offering, revealing and concealing simultaneously. The pearls embedded in the relief refer to their long tradition as exotic trade objects and symbols of sexual allure as well as votive offerings, as in the case of the Virgin Mary of Tinos. The final composition seems to allude to the frictions between notions of sexuality, emancipated femininity and motherhood that agitate and divide contemporary culture.