MJ Lifestyle Issue 01 Digital

SECULAR MARYS
Original Artwork by Nichole Graf
My Secular Mary series began as a meditation on
the disconnection I’ve felt throughout my life with
depictions of women deemed to be “holy” or revered
by organized religions—specifically in the many
varied forms of Christianity. I spent an early nine
years submerged and confused in the teachings of
Catholicism and never once felt connection, aspiration,
or even shared sense of humanity with the women
portrayed in religious art— and this very much was true
of the imagery and archetypes of adult womanhood that
was provided for young girls in my small midwestern
town as a whole throughout my childhood. I’ve grown
up to be a woman that is constantly caught in wonder of
the beauty, strength, and magnetism of other women.
I am awed by the diversity of expressions there are for
being a woman in this world. I wanted to shift the
gaze of what is to be revered as holy to a reverence and
meditation of what it is to be a woman as seen by other
women. A veneration of what it is within women that
sparks notions of magic, of the divine. My hope is to
document this holy spirit and produce these works as
a new canon, to sanctify the notion of womanhood as
one that broadens our notion of the feminine.
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