the three ages of woman
2020
reclaimed fabrics and yarns, knitwear fragments, cotton lace, threads, sisal rope
205 × 190 cm

“…everything that surrounds us is alive and perfectly harmonised, guided and sustained by a single force. This force, which connects and upholds the living world, is hidden in every thing. It has the nature of a stream with its continuous variability, its constant flow. It is one, yet ever-changing. It drives living beings toward perpetual development and self-perfection. It causes everything that is to have its BEGINNING, its PERIOD OF FULL MATURITY, and its END. And despite all differences, everything is unity, and from everything, everything can arise. In each thing there is a part of another thing. In everything there is a part of everything; all things are one.”

This quote from Olga Tokarczuk’s novel The Journey of the Book-People became the inspiration for the work.

Three women: birth, growth, and decay. Past, present, and future. Each of these stages contains the others. They form unity within multiplicity. They interpenetrate one another like warp and weft in a woven structure. The river in which the women wade, flowing into the ocean, is like the connection between individuality and the absolute.

A symbol of transformation — of desire and anger into wisdom — is the lotus flower held by the old woman. Its pure beauty blooms only in muddy, turbid water. Hence the necessity of the so-called earthly labour, remorse, and repentance — all the mud from which the miraculous flower can finally emerge.