Sacred Wound (Black)

This subject re-occurs across art history but often is disguised and hidden within iconographic sub-texts. It is creative and powerful alluding to the apparently contradictory forces of joy, pain and change. The Sacred Wound is the critical act through which the mortal achieves divinity and revalation. Christ must have his Crucifixion. Dionysius must boast to attract Titanic enemies. Persephone be carried down to Hades and married to Darkness and Artemis must kill him who comes too close. When life is hard, we are primed to learn something central,Christians might call it God's special hiding place. The huge surprise of the Christian revelation is that the place of the wound is the place of the greatest gift. The tension between revealing that our very wounds can become sacred wounds.
It is no surprise that those unjustly wounded become the central transformative symbols in so many contexts. In this exhibition the inverting of a classical Sacred Wound sculpture easily directs the viewer toward sexual pleasure and away from divine pain. Carl Jung on the subject suggested that "there is no advantage to playing the victim, and we are forever warned against victimizing others. Henceforth, we are indeed saved by gazing upon the wounded one-and loving there our own woundedness and everybody else's wounds too (John 3:14, 12:32, 19:37). One's world is henceforth grounded in mutual vulnerability instead of any need to have power over one another."


Hand-painted Jesmonite.

ED. /10

Signed by the Artist.

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