persephone

the rape of persephone cumulative + abutted sm.jpg

wheat. photogram and drawing PC021114.jpg

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Persephone

I am obsessed with the Greek myth of Persephone. Persephone splits her time. She is a dutiful daughter, who spends half of the year on earth with her powerful mother Demeter, and the other half with her husband Hades, God of the underworld, who abducted Persephone while she was picking flowers in a field with her friends. The story of how she came to split her time is one of deals brokered, hearts broken, trickery, violence, and perhaps personal choice.

Using other’s representations of Persephone’s story, and by creating my own, I examine the dichotomies of lust and love, bounty and famine, and life and death. In the underworld Persephone ate (planted) the seeds of a pomegranate, an action that sealed her fate. In summer she returns to the world to tend to other’s needs, and bring rebirth and agricultural fertility. In winter, when nothing grows, she is in the underworld.