- / Professions of the Giants
- / Mellita
- / Goddess Making
- / Saturday is Alright to Fight for Your Rights
The Goddess Project by the Maltese artist Nina Gerada comprises a collective of small female terracotta torsos, referencing Maltese Neolithic statuettes (from c. 3300 – 2450 BC), specifically the ‘Tarxien and Mnajdra women’, which are thought to be self-portraits made during pregnancy and offered as votives for success in childbirth. Made soon after Gerada first became a mother, she made hundreds, working fast. A cathartic process after a difficult birth, it was a way of processing the artist’s frustrations with new motherhood and her evolving feminist ideas. Modern ideas of feminine beauty – as thin, young, and so on – are subverted for contorted spines, scars, ageing skin, breasts and bodies of all sizes, a reclamation of the body, agency and stories of womanhood.
The goddesses were initially autobiographical, forming a collection of the artist’s fractured and evolving identities in relation to her body. Yet when seen as a whole, this is a community of women, an antidote to the isolation of new motherhood. The piece asks us to consider the relationship between the individual and the collective. By lining them up in the hundreds, the pieces allude to generations of women; ancestors to hold the vulnerable new mother and a line of women capable of evolving and transforming. Over the course of six years, the artist has traveled with the Goddesses to hold conversations with women and celebrate their stories. She holds workshops for women to make their own statuettes, they are spaces for collaborative making, sharing stories and creating agency.
ARTIST: Nina Gerada