First, I just wanted to bring back colors into my life utterly poisoned by the war in Ukraine for more than a year. I felt like creating something grotesque, naïve, warm, and homelike.
I escaped to my tapestry-meditation and enjoyed playing with colors and textures of threads. After nine months of work, I was awarded with the desired look and feel of my piece. Two pieces constituting a diptych.
Why Eve and Adam?
I think artists are likely to turn to canonical heroes in the moments of crisis. Though not bound by any canon now, we tend to follow it as the easiest symbolic path.
The pair of Adam and Eve is a very well-established artistic and religious symbol. But for me personally they are primarily interesting as an idea the first couple ever.
Surprisingly this very idea – that God created a pair of two genders with clear subordination between them – appeared late in the human history. It happened only in the bronze age, when freshly developing states required a clear gender hierarchy to oppose neolithic gender egalitarism.
For thousands of years before creation myths had never dramatized the bi-gender social model. Sumerians, ancient India, pre-state Egypt and traditional cultures all over the world had more flexible views on genders, acknowledging the third gender as well as praising natural uniqueness of different kinds of people rather than drawing rigid boundaries between the predetermined gender roles.
The story of Adam and Eve appropriated by the Abrahamic religions laid the basis for the gender hierarchy prevailing until recently. Currently observing the destruction of this structure, I am very curious about the myths that had started building the hierarchy.
You see my Eve and Adam still naked, thus, still in the Garden of Eden. I could not help thinking about the myth of the Mongandu people in Africa, that still remembers the time when people lived happily naked with bonobos in the forest, until they put on clothes which separated them from the rest of the world.
I wanted to show my Eve and Adam at that moment when they were still part of the nature, but already doomed to irreversible changes. It’s like they are saying to each other: “Ok! What’s next?”
