The Art of Mary Church: New Arrivals!
The Qlippoth Series
The Qlippoth (pronounced “Kly-poth”) Series has now been uploaded to our store on Shopify. Each image has been digitally hi-rezzed and is available in the three formats of posters, framed posters and thin canvas prints on wooden frames, and all in varying sizes.
This is a series that dates from her middle (art school) period. It is a narrative that was inspired by the work of contemporary artist Anselm Kiefer who, at his art installation at La Ribaute, uses pieces of shattered glass for the flooring.
This is Kiefer’s evocation of the Kabbalistic myth of the Shevirat ha Kelim, or the Breaking of the Vessels in which the power of God’s Light as it descends through the 10 Sephiroth is so great that it breaks all the vessels trying to contain it. The shards are known as “qlippoth” which refers to the broken up pieces of matter that compose the earthly world of Malkuth, but also the demons of Darkness who resist the Light. For Kiefer, there is an additional semiotic layer painted on top of the Jewish myth which refers to the breaking of the West’s vessels during the two great wars of the last century. Those wars for Kiefer broke all the West’s transcendental signifieds into shards of signifiers that are no longer contained by any apparatus of semiotic capture. We are thus left with an “art after metaphysics” as I have termed it in my 2013 book of the same title.
In Church’s narrative, the chair functions as a signifier in place of an actual human being. In the first image—with a classic Jungian 3:1—one chair has been disturbed and is out of order. It is the disaffected individual who is about to take a night sea journey, but it is also a signifier for the West itself. The chair disappears in the third image down a long dark tunnel that is illuminated by the mechanical searchlight of the Mouthcube—a symbol for the qlippoth demons which Church, like Rudolf Steiner, associated with industrial society—and then reappears in an ascent up a ladder to view an Edenic world of rural society, a society, however, that has barely been left intact by deforestation. The Mouthcube speaks the Word—not the Heraclitean Logos but its opposite, a mechanical parody—and shatters the ladder to pieces just as the chair has been shattered in what looks like a jail cell. The final two images function as apotheoses of the narrative with a very doubtful Jungian-type mandala that is nervously surrounded by a highway.
Needless to say, Church was no fan of industrial society and its discontents.
Here is the link to make purchases for those interested: