Spring is here.
Sort of.
Our Goddess has awakened from Winter's long sleep, although, apparently, she's not ready to abandon her cocoon altogether. So, she wears it—loosening here, opening there.
Because emerging isn't the same as arriving.
​
She still carries Winter's questions: Am I pretty enough? Thin enough? Good enough? Do you approve?
But something has changed.

Another Goddess has emerged from her cocoon.
She's learned about food. She's learned about beauty. She's learned that thin is good and thinner is apparently better.
Now she learns something even more problematic:
Ask someone else what they think.

Ah, validation! That peculiar habit of handing someone else the measuring stick and then anxiously waiting for the results.
Well?
Does this ass make my butt look big?

​There are, of course, several things wrong with the question.
Beginning with the fact that she's naked.
On a donkey.
Apparently, those details don't concern her.
Yet her bottom does.

The donkey, meanwhile, looks as though it would very much like to be excluded from the conversation.
Its expression could be sympathetic. Perhaps it understands the burden of being judged by appearances.
Or perhaps it's simply thinking:
Lady, I'm an ass. What exactly did you expect?
​
​And maybe that's the joke beneath the joke.
She's looking outward for reassurance when perhaps she should be looking inward. Open-eyed, but not quite seeing. Still measuring herself against standards she didn't invent ​and seeking answers from anyone willing—or unfortunate enough—to provide them.

​She's still in Winter, after all.
Still becoming.
Still learning the difference between being seen and seeing herself.

Exiting Winter's cocoon, our next Goddess enters the world.
And the world has suggestions.

Be attractive.
Be desirable.
Be disciplined.

And above all, be thin.
Very thin.

I know.  I'm admitting my age here, but for women of my generation, thinness wasn't merely one version of beauty. It was the prerequisite. There could be no pretty without thin.

Inspired by Carmen Miranda, the Brazilian Bombshell from the mid 1950’s who introduced fruit basket haberdashery decades before Edible Arrangements arrived on the runway, ‘We are What We Eat’ balances an entire food pyramid on her head: healthy fruits and vegetables near the bottom, followed by increasingly questionable choices as we climb toward the heavens. Bread. Pie. Candy. Chocolate.
And, presiding over the whole nutritional enterprise? A martini.
​Balance is everything.

But look at her.
She doesn't seem entirely convinced.

​Is she leaning because she's struggling to keep everything in balance?
Or is that slight tilt something else entirely?

Maybe she's beginning to suspect the whole arrangement is ridiculous.

After all, We Are What We Eat may have less to do with what's on our plates than with what we're fed.
Ideas about beauty.
Ideas about our bodies.
Ideas about what we must deny ourselves in order to belong.
We consume those too.
And some of them take a very long time to digest.
Perhaps becoming begins when we start questioning the menu.
​

​If our Playboy Bunny represented female sexuality as imagined from the outside, this Goddess is what happens when the woman herself gets a vote.
Suddenly, two arms simply aren't enough.
Inspired by the multi-armed goddesses of Hindu tradition, she stands bare-breasted and unapologetic, crowned in pearls, holding four objects freighted with several thousand years of ideas about women, sex, temptation and knowledge.
And, just to keep things complicated, she's wearing a chastity belt.
Mixed messages, anyone?

​In one hand, an orchid—a nod to Georgia O'Keeffe and those lush, sensual flowers that generations of viewers have insisted on seeing as female anatomy. O'Keeffe herself resisted that interpretation, which makes the reference even more interesting: once again, who gets to decide what the female image means—the woman who created it, or the people looking at it?

​In another hand, the apple and the serpent. Eve takes a bite, humanity falls, and somehow the woman has been answering for it ever since. Curiosity becomes disobedience. Knowledge becomes sin. Female appetite becomes dangerous.

​Then there is the owl of Athena, goddess of wisdom. Because perhaps knowing—knowing one's mind, one's body, one's desires—isn't something to fear after all.

And finally, Pandora's vessel. Not a box, despite what centuries of retelling have taught us, but a pithos—a large Greek storage jar. Pandora opens it and releases suffering into the world.
Another curious woman.
Another catastrophe.
Another woman blamed.
But the story has an important footnote: Hope remained.
Perhaps that deserves more attention.
​
Our Goddess holds all these contradictions simultaneously: temptation and wisdom, innocence and experience, restraint and desire, danger and hope. Her breasts are exposed while her sexuality is literally under lock and key. Pearls—those old symbols of purity—form an extravagant crown on the head of a woman who no longer looks particularly interested in being pure for anyone.

And look at her face.
Unlike our bewildered Bunny Venus, she doesn't seem to be asking how she should be seen.
She knows we're looking.
She just doesn't appear terribly concerned about what we think.
Maybe that's the reality of female sexuality: not a single thing at all. Not something bestowed by an admirer, defined by a religion, packaged by Playboy, blamed by mythology or contained by a chastity belt.
It can be sensual. Cerebral. Curious. Contradictory. Complicated. Funny. Powerful. 
And entirely her own.
​
Good luck putting that back in the bottle.

Cocooned within her snakeskin coverings, she sleeps. And dreams.
Within her lies great potential—ideas not yet spoken, talents not yet tested, desires not yet dared.
But leaving her cocoon has consequences.
The world beyond is uncertain. Exposure brings both possibility and vulnerability.
Is she peaceful in her waiting? Or simply oblivious?

Extraction is painful.
And yet, once freed...
Oh, how they glow!

We have all been here, wrapped in the comfort of what we know, wondering if we are ready to shed our skin. 

​Is there a particular age when it's too soon to reflect upon the past…
or too late to imagine the future? 
​
Lately, as I approach the Autumn of my life, I've been wondering about that.
Does every season bring its own crossroad?
​
The young imagine endless futures.
​The old revisit familiar roads. 

Artists, I think, do both —looking backward while  seeking the  bend ahead.

Recently I revisited a group of sculptures I’d created a quarter century ago.
The Goddess Series, created sometime during the middle of my own Summer, sculpted in clay and embellished with low-fire glazes, metallic leaf, pearls, and semiprecious stones, each figure stands about fifteen inches tall. 

​I can still remember the moment my Muse tapped me on the shoulder.

"Got an idea," she said.
​
She suggested I think about becoming.
Not success.
Not achievement.
​
Becoming.

Reflecting on how Winter becomes a season of waiting, dreaming, and holding beneath the surface the seeds of what will come. ​

Considering how Spring arrives with its awkward grace—discovering, testing limits, and bumping into boundaries. ​

​Ruminating on how Summer brings its own adventures: responsibility, family, work, love, strength, and the delightful illusion that we might someday have everything under control.

Then comes Autumn.
Not as an ending, but as another beginning.

A season of shedding old skins, loosening the grip of impossible expectations, and gradually discovering that authenticity is a far more comfortable garment.

Over the coming weeks, I'd like to introduce you to each goddess.
Not as an exhibition.
More like a reunion.

Even after a quarter of a century, I don't believe we're finished.
​We're becoming.