Pyrrha’s Offering, 2016, creek-dug clay fired to cone 06, rock salt, barbed wire, installation, dimensions variable
About Pyrrha’s Offering
In Greek mythology, When Zeus decided to end the Bronze Age with the great deluge, Prometheus had foreseen the coming flood and told his son Deucalion to build an ark. Deucalion and his wife, Pyrrha, were the only survivors.
Once the deluge was over and the couple were on land, Deucalion and Pyrrha consulted an oracle of Themis about how to repopulate the earth. They were told to throw the bones of their mother over their shoulders. Deucalion and Pyrrha understood the “mother” to be Gaia, the mother of all living things, and the “bones” to be rocks. They threw the rocks behind them. The rocks soon began to change form, and the beginnings of human forms emerged. The stones thrown by Pyrrha became women; those thrown by Deucalion became men.
My installation is a statement on the power of women to create and rebuild. It is made of 106 bones hand-formed directly from the earth, using clay dug from a creek on my wooded property in southern Indiana. They pieces were fired and strewn over a bed of rock salt, covering strands of barbed wire to represent the misdeeds of humanity that led to Zeuss’ anger and the consequent deluge.