Eve

When I began my research for this series of paintings—contemporary Joan of Arc, scholarly Eve and her tempestuous friend, and Mary and Mary Magdalene mourning at the foot of a crucifix of modern-day martyrs—I was reconciling with my devout Irish-Catholic upbringing. As a young girl, I had begun asking myself questions of worth, goodness, and womanhood, and the holy nature I was supposed to fulfill as a Catholic. When I began these paintings, I was fixated on the story of Genesis. How a curious woman was given the burden of damning our souls, setting them up to later be saved via a holy submissive virgin giving her miraculous son up to be slaughtered for humanity’s re-entrance into the kingdom of heaven—thereby neutralizing the evilness of women and elevating the ultimate goodness of man. I had never believed the story in a fundamental sense, but I wondered how this narrative, even engaged with strictly metaphorically, had shaped my understanding of my own sex. As an adolescent Catholic, I felt that sinful Eve and holy Mary were always at odds within me. As an adult, I didn’t want to feel split anymore—I wanted to be whole.

Besides, let’s just imagine this pivotal story did not end with Eve accepting the fruit and then giving it to Adam. What would have happened? What is Paradise and never-ending goodness? What is a reward without a fight? What is shame’s relationship to consciousness? So when I painted Eve, I painted her as a vampish scholar in a commanding back dress with hiking boots, and books by feminist scholars strewn at her feet that seem to be coming out of the tree itself. I wanted to position Eve as the first woman who was brave enough to really look at herself and engage with her shadow, Lilith, who, according to myth, was punished for refusing to submit to Adam, her soul cast and trapped into a tree–yes, that tree. If you look closely, you can see a vaginal-like formation in the bark of the tree that glows pink.

The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil is a pomegranate tree, both because of an old colloquial term for it, the “desert apple,” and because of the pomegranate’s link to Persephone, Greek goddess of the underworld and spring, and thus of duality. In researching the pomegranate I also discovered that, before it was completely domesticated, it was used as both a contraceptive and fertility aid, depending on which part of the plant was eaten and at what point a woman was in her menstrual cycle. With its many seeds encased in their sticky blood-red capsules, the fruit also reminds me of ovaries—an apt choice for the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, specifically when studying the Fall through a feminist lens.

Through this same lens, the serpent—a creature praised throughout pre-Christian global myth as a knowledgeable, cunning creature that can transcend earth, sea, and sky—becomes a divine agent of chaos, offering Eve knowledge forbidden by an omnipotent God. The sapling fig tree, her shame, juxtaposed over Eve’s splayed open legs, arises from the crease of a Bible, open to Genesis.