Female trinity - sketch in progress

The Virgin Mary, Pachamama and a Pin-up girl

1. The Virgin Mary: the image of Mary the Mother of God is drawn here from a small head sculpture of Mary that has been passed down to me from my Irish Catholic maternal grandmother "Nanna". I have vivd memories of her eyes following me as I would cross from one side of my Nanna's bedroom to the other as a small child, an impactful and slightly unnerving optical illusion caused by the concave rendering of the sculpture.

2. Pachamama (Mother Earth) : the Goddess revered by the indigenous Andean people, a pagan concept grounded in nature and the elements that really resonates with me. I was drawn to this concept on my travels in Central America in 2010, then again during my travels through Chile, Bolivia, Argentina and Brazil in 2013 and during the year and half I spent living in Ecuador from 2014 to 2015. I love that i can connect to a felt sense of Pachamama and it is her earthy, fertile and vibrant manifestation of femininity that I most identify with. The postcard pinned to the wall in this photo, whose image I started bringing into the drawing, is from Bolivia's Aymara artist Mamani Mamani.

3. The Pin-up Girl: a sensual image of confident female sexuality, this commercial image printed on a matchbox also references the dominant male gaze and objectification of the female body. In juxtaposition with the image of the Virgin Mary it provokes questions of imposed sexual morality, and conflict between the sexual and the nurturing aspects of femininity.

The order I instinctively listed these three in is interesting to me because it perhaps reflects the order in which I came familiar with my own femininity.