Inside Out & Outside In

Artist: Mariam Muradian
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Inside Out & Outside In

This is a photographic companion piece to the
Heart Condition pieces 1 & 2. Self portrait.

2009 Copyright. All Rights Reserved to Mariam Muradian.

“Heart Condition 1” & “Heart Condition 2”
plus
photographic companion piece “Inside Out & Outside In”
By Mariam Muradian
July 2009

Heart Condition 1 & 2

These two paintings along with their one photograph companion piece represent a profound and ancient Incan ritual and symbolism; and the irrecoverable moment of self-realization of its generational power and intimately threaded wisdom.
Compare and contrast the degrees of light and dark, hard and smoooth…then translate that into attitudes, feelings, and behaviors.
While working and living in Mexico, in 1985 I became close to a 100% Incan family.
Nights were filled with curious brews; books and music; astronomy and stories about the personification of stars and constellations we gazed at in the vast, black, night sky.
I was given as a gift, a sacred amulet, only for women. This Incan amulet was for protection, and it was customary for mothers to pass this down to their daughters, and they to theirs….

I became more and more aware how these women “lived” with their own amulet.
It was completely different from American women picking out a piece of jewelry for the evening to go with an outfit. Each amulet seemed to know its owner’s intimate history, passions, disappointments, abuses, longings, the conditions of her life and her body and her heart. No woman acted judgmentally, spitefully, nor was anyone bent on interpretation or projection. The amulet carried an air of privacy: all those details a woman keeps to herself, hides in her heart, or throws into the deepest ocean to be forgotten.
Yet the Incan amulet was so revealing. I saw these amulets in so many representative states of “being”. Some were visibly blackened, dented and scraped…and you could see in the owner’s eyes that something unforgivable/unspeakable had happened to her once upon a time. A newly forged shiny smooth gold amulet I sense would fool nobody; denial would catch up to her along with oxygen and hard labor. We are earth, we are the elements themselves that are made into this amulet…..not possible for one to betray the other, therefore, one’s self.
The amulet itself is shaped like a heart or vagina. Where does a woman need the most protection? The heart and vagina metaphorically house all that is prized, all that is worth living for and dying for in this lifetime. What is allowed to penetrate these sacred symbolic vessels, these very real parts of woman?
My small three piece series represents the degrees to which we as women have been “penetrated” and what levels of hardening or acceptance happen as a result over time. How much of a woman’s worth, will, and spirit and body will be passed along to our daughters along with the amulet?
This symbol of the Incan women’s amulet, in my art and around my neck, has brought this awareness and internalization.

Inside Out & Outside In belongs to the following groups:

Self as Other and The Artistic Nude