Mary J. Tafoya

Serial Woman
beadwork
16 x 9 in.

Serial Woman is part commentary on our society’s horrendous regard for women as prey, on sexual abuse as titillating entertainment in the popular media; yet also a positive acknowledgment of our tremendous capacity for inner and outer renewal and healing despite our circumstances, for finding the ways to RE-MEMBER our bodies and ourselves, for not leaving things as they lie, but using our creative potential to first express the condition of fragmentation, and then to carry that creative energy along until we are whole again.

I would like to say that I chose the visual image of a nude woman stitched together, lying on a healing bed, because it was the simplest and most direct way to express the difficult feelings I was hit with on a particularly bad day, but the truth is, just before I finally fell off to sleep Serial Woman popped into my head exactly like this, title and all, so I beaded her that way, not understanding half of her complex and contradictory layers of meaning until later, when the time came to talk about her.

© Mary J. Tafoya