The 'Maternal' Feminist: Exploring The Primal in Women's Art

Abstract

This paper explores women's art that interrogates the logic intrinsic to a powerful concept of maternal caring evident in Marian iconography. While conventional portrayals of women in the history of art connote maternity as divine and mystical, women's art with a feminist sensibility reconfigures the mother figure as monstrous and forbidding. Through the use of visual semiotics and Kristevan psychoanalytic theories, I analyse how feminist art reconciles sacred and sadistic states for a more aggressive mother to emerge.