BODIES OF POWER, ARTIST'S STATEMENT: For at least 2,000 years, women were subordinate to men both in theory and in practice. One of the main moral supports for this system of dominance and subordination was the Church. And yet this was not just a sociological structure, but something women experienced in everyday life. My art explores the ways in which this 2,000 years of experience is written onto the bodies of women and how I as a women continue to wrestle with this legacy in my own life.

The church is an institution as well as a context for belief. But it is also literally a building, a physical embodiment of a set of ideas about God and the world. In the same way, women's bodies have been represented as the embodiment of various ideas and ideals, usually not their own. Gothic architecture in particular glorified the hierarchical relationship between God and Man, between the powerful and powerless, between men and women. By portraying women as literally bound up in Gothic structures I am questioning both my desire for the stability and trust that the church can offer as well as the fear of the subordination and submission that comes with that. In particular, women have been servants of men, just as men have been servants of Christ. If Christ's sacrifice of body and blood is the source of human salvation than what are women's sacrifices the source of?

In particular, the domestic sacrifices, not just of child-bearing, but of care giving seem essential, yet are all too often a medium through which power seems to flow, and then only in one direction. For me, meat has always symbolized this transaction between sacrifice and servitude. As Betty Fussell notes in her book, My Kitchen Wars, "Cooking and eating are a form of mediation between heaven and earth, life and death, in the workplace of the kitchen. The kitchen mediates between power and submission and love and hate and all the other dynamics of living and dying, day by day. In the kitchen the literal and symbolic, visible and intelligible, are as indistinguishable as the body and blood of Christ in bread and wine. "Women cook and serve meat, women give birth to flesh, and women are themselves all too often perceived as little more than a piece of meat.

In the end, I am asking how it might be possible for women to reclaim their bodily selves as part of the process toward reclaiming their spiritual selves from a tradition that has distorted and subordinated them.

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