Exhibition
THE MODERN MUSE ~ EXHIBITION
Celebrating the power and beauty of women in the middle years.
5th – 10th March 2024, International Women's Week
Opening Night
Tuesday 5th March, 6 - 8pm
Dress for Success Charity Lunch
Thursday 7th March, 12 – 2pm
Dress for Success Charity Dinner
Thursday 7th March, 6 – 8pm
Meet the Artist, Poetry Reading & Panel Discussion
Saturday 9th March, 3 - 4pm
Foreword by Miranda Darling
The mid-point in life can mark a dislocation for women, a break in their story that often comes with little spiritual or psychological preparation. Women shift gear: no longer nubile, no longer fertile, no longer as sexually desirable, no longer ‘young’, we might mourn these losses as we slip into a sort of social invisibility; we also conversely experience a freedom, from the demands of very young children, from the absolute tyranny of the kitchen sink, from powerful pressures to conform to socially-proscribed roles. It becomes possible at this mid-life point to surpass our givens and reclaim an open future. Accumulated years, considered in this light, can provoke a giddy almost intoxicating feeling of possibility.
Simone de Beauvoir wrote: “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” As girls we experience multitude of deep transformations that essentially ‘happen’ to us: we menstruate and become women; we may marry and become wives, gestate, give birth, lactate as mothers we inhabit identities that have ‘happened’ to us, that come with deep-set expectations and anxieties; most days, our lives do not feel like our own. Is there then a point, somewhere around 50 years of living, where we women begin to un-become?
This is a subversive thought. It smacks of evasion from the control of others, of a reclamation of essence, of the potential to transcend constricting situations. Our bodies return to us and a space opens for a revision of the self. As women, we contain multitudes, a constellation of essential selves, of inhabited roles. Years bring with them the experience, the visions, the Knowing, and create a palette we can use to manifest a life aligned to our deepest values. We choose who to be; we return to ourselves.
The Modern Muse is a photographic essay that features 50 women captured at this point in their lives. Cindy’s process involves in-depth engagement with the subjects of her photographs: these portraits are not merely likenesses, the seizing of light on a surface, but rather issue from the inside out. Cindy spends hours listening to the stories of her subjects, to how they chart their inner worlds, where they find themselves now, what longings, what joys, what sorrows they hold, and crucially for the project, what element of their many selves they wish to inhabit as Essential.
Working with the idea of Jungian archetypes, Cindy explores the wildness women hold within. There is, in these photographs, a celebration of womanhood – of identity, pride, self-love and self-acceptance that comes from a place rooted in deep mythological time and cosmic continuity. The 50/50 project both holds a space for female self-creation, but also weaves the archetypal spells that link us to ancient wisdoms, to the women who came before us, to the unbroken chain of Knowing. These portraits become then the Re-telling – re-telling of the stories pressed on us by society, the subverting of ideas and ideals of value; they are a celebration of power and the freedom to dare, to seek, to invent a life from the inside out.
In allowing themselves to be photographed in this way, the subjects are choosing how they wish to become visible to the world. It is a rebellion and a restoration and a re-balancing of the narrative, one in which each woman shifts now back from society’s object, to being the subject of her own life.
Each of us has that native, embodied wisdom – a wild, untamed, undomesticated body-mind and heart that know what is true for us. This looks and feels different for each woman, and no two are ever alike.
— Michaela Bœm, The Wild Woman's Way
