----------

PIETA (September 11th 2001) A Pieta is a picture or sculpture of the Virgin Mary holding the dead body of Christ on her lap. It was a subject that I found myself drawn to tackle shortly after the events in New York. This is a very emotive subject and I hesitate to try to explain what was going through my mind during the time I worked on it. The word ‘vulnerability’ is at the heart of what must have been the overwhelming sense for many of us who watched the horrific pictures from America. But there were other images for me which came to the surface of consciousness. One from the Vietnam War of the girl running toward the camera, naked and burnt from a napalm raid. Also a newspaper picture of a Rodin sculpture dug out of the rubble in New York, the feet severed from its legs. It lay face down in the dust, faceless, like so many hundreds of the dead of that day. So this image ‘Pieta’ is just as much about our condition in this broken world as an old established religious subject. I wanted to express my compassion and love in the midst of suffering, the love of a mother for her dead child.