Visual Meditation Easter – Small Still Birth

(Small Still Birth by Polly Morgan - found here)

“In the Christian’s mental image bank there is a large store of Resurrection images: Christ triumphantly bursting out of his casket, breaking down the gates of hell, trampling Satan underfoot, or levitating over an empty tomb, spreading wide his arms to display his glorified wounds. Or else the event is represented by women encountering the empty tomb, perhaps interacting with the angel who tells them, ‘He is not here, for he is risen!’

These images are BIG and unambiguously heroic; a dead baby quail on a string is not. But that’s precisely the image Art Below founder Ben Moore selected to represent the Resurrection in the 2014 ‘Stations of the Cross’ exhibition at St. Marylebone’s Parish Church in London: Small Still Birth by taxidermist Polly Morgan.

Morgan is known for her artistic use of dead animals; they are the raw materials of her conceptual ‘sculptures’. In Small Still Birth, life and death commingle as a quail chick dangles limply from the string of a red balloon inside a bell jar. This image is not glorious in a grand way, nor does it have the feel of conquest that most Resurrection images do, but nevertheless it suggests—gently—a rising from death.

On an episode of the BBC documentary series What Do Artists Do All Day?, Morgan said she intended for the balloon to be evocative of a womb and the string of an umbilical cord. The title of the work suggests a baby born dead—but the letter spacing in ‘still birth’ opens up another possibility: what if this ‘small stillbirth’ is actually a ‘small, still birth’, the early stirrings, barely perceptible at first, of a corpse coming to life, of spirit (re)filling flesh?

The balloon is what gives this piece its hopeful tone, for it is the nature of balloons to rise. Not only that, but as a popular party decoration the balloon alludes to the joy and celebration of Easter. Just as the balloon lifts up the little bird from death, so too did the Resurrection pull Jesus up into new, transfigured life. For him, tomb became womb, a nest of ripening, from which he emerged three days later, born anew.”
~Victoria E. Jones

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