Photobook Saturday

Icons
My quest is to create objects that facilitate
connection with the divine, and that challenge the
patriarchal and hierarchical representations of the
Christian tradition. I use the idea of ‘the Abject’ as
described by French feminist Julia Kristeva as a
way of approaching this.
Icons in the religious sense are religious paintings
used for devotion, strongly symbolic. The word
usually refers to a specific style and tradition, but I
am using the word more widely for images made
to help people connect with soul, spirit and ‘god’. I
come from a white Western Christian tradition,
but find that the almost exclusively masculine
images and language for ‘god’ do not help me
make this connection and in many cases are
repellent.
A non-patriarchal and non-hierarchical
understanding of ‘god’ is outlined in Kristeva’s
writings; not the patriarchal religious system she
calls ‘symbolic’ but the ‘semiotic’ religion she
would describes as a divine power that connects
everyone and everything to the divine and each
other.[1] This idea is similar to some
contemporary Christian thought: ‘Everything I see
and know is one uni-verse, revolving around one
coherent centre. This Divine Presence seeks
connection and communion, not separation or
division[2].’
Human belief in a force or being that created and
sustains the universe, in universal pattern, or a
deity, is by definition impossible to understand or
describe, so I set myself a fairly impossible
question. Monotheistic religions agree that no
image or name can represent a god who, when
asked for their name, would only say ‘I am who I
am’. While Pantheistic religions have many gods
portraying different aspects of the divine, even
within themselves, monotheistic faiths rely on a
multiplicity of metaphors, and in some cases a cast
of saintly characters to connect with different
aspects of the divine mystery.
Universal Pattern1 and II
Pippa King, 2019
Linocut and collage on paper, 420 x 594
Photographed among the arches on which the design is based, Pippa King, August 2020
Right:
Pray
Pippa King 2020
Photograph of randomly folded cloth printed with a repeating pattern made from a drawing of a triskelion pattern,
mounted on board, (Pippa King, 2019) photographed 2020 in a niche with tapers