Offering - 2021
Can skin touch across vast distance? Across generations of time? Or worlds of difference? And, what is it for one’s skin to touch another’s anyway? Philosopher Luce Irigaray describes the “touch of the caress” – a gentle lover’s touch by which the felt limits of the skin return the one and the other back to themselves in what is a gesture of acknowledgement and affirmation of their difference. Might this be the same kind of tenderness we practice in moments of remembrance, whether of a lover or any other loved?
In Offering, skin mediates between artist and ancestor, connecting the two across time and space. Wallaby parchment is combined with butcher’s paper to create a gestural lekythos-like vase, decorated with line drawing—drawn in ballpoint pen, as if a reminder written on the skin of the hand—to remember and imaginatively depict my fifth-great-grandmother’s life story.
While the details of Mary Ann’s story beyond her crime and convict journey from England to Australia in 1802 are not fully known—all I know is that she stole, among other things, thirteen yards of Irish cloth which she “wrapped round her waist” and was thus “transported for seven years” as a consequence— I imagine the moment that led to her conviction as ecstatic (that is, outside the limits of any fixed state) and acknowledge too the colonising origin that I myself, by birth, now share in.
Taking the shape of a classical funerary vessel traditionally filled with oil and offered as a gift for the dead, this work, like death itself, unsettles sentimentality to remember that experiences of life and death are forever touching and that now, with worlds and histories as enmeshed as ever, tender, instinctive gestures that acknowledge the connection between the two may be just what we need.
Rebekah Pryor
Dr Rebekah Pryor is a visual artist and academic based on Bunurong/Boonwurrung Country, southeast of Naarm, Melbourne. She is Director of the Doctor of Professional Practice program in the University of Divinity’s School of Graduate Research and a member of the Australian Collaborators in Feminist Theologies.
Her artistic and research practice focuses on sex, gender and sexuality and how these are constructed, embodied, represented and renegotiated in material cultures and communities of belief.
Recent publications include: Motherly: Reimagining the Maternal Body in Feminist Theology and Contemporary Art (SCM Press, 2022), Feminist Theologies: Interstices and Fractures, edited with Stephen Burns (Lexington/Fortress Press, 2023; Contemporary Feminist Theologies: Power, Authority, Love, coedited with Kerrie Handasyde and Cathryn McKinney (Routledge, 2021); “Caring Rituals and Rituals of Care” in Care Ethics and Art, edited by Jacqueline Milner and Gretchen Coombs (Routledge, 2022); “Materials in Tension: Assemblage and the Art of Revelation” in Numinous Fields, edited by Samer Akkach and John Powell (Brill, 2024); and “Good Feminist Collaboration” co-authored with Cathryn McKinney, in SCM Companion to Feminist Theology, edited by Kerrie Handasyde, Katharine Massam and Stephen Burns (SCM Press, 2024).