Published on February 10, 2025

Phoebe Godfrey

Phoebe Godfrey, The Womb of Creation, 2024, mixed media, 40x60 inches, image courtesy of the artist.

Creation!

This piece came out of my desire to illustrate the idea of Creation. All human cultures have Creation Stories, and in our culture, for the most part, we look to the Book of Genesis as representing the only true version of creation done by God the Father. However, I took inspiration from Ch. 1 in Genesis where God states, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness”, indicating sex/gender plurality, as in there being a male and female deity, as opposed to in Ch. 2. Therefore, I wanted to focus on this first chapter and the role of the Goddess, imagining that it was in fact She who gave birth to the Earth, and from there, clay and soil, all life, including our own, was born.

The clay in this piece is not fired and so it is cracking, illustrating our fragility and our mortality. In addition, the Birch branches are seen in many cultures to represent ‘new beginnings’. Finally, the typewriter represents the need all humans have to invent and tell and re-tell their Creation stories,

May 1000 new creation stories continue to bloom…