Works on Yupo paper.

Enlightenment. Watercolor and India Ink. 2022.

Sheela Na Gig

A glow-in-the-dark rainbow. Flame.

Inflamed. Watercolor and India ink.

Apparition. Watercolor and India ink.

Melting. Watercolor, tempera, marker, colored pencil, embroidery, gel pen, and glitter medium on paper.

 Vag-eye-nas.

“Anyone who claims to be good has yet to shake hands with her dark side. Across a hundred years I've met most of my parts, and I've lived a good deal in the shadows. I've reconciled the anger with the hope, the bitter with the bullshit, the yearning with the grief, the fake with the true. I have an unkempt soul. I am extraordinarily ordinary. But I have known love - great love. Oh, yes, I've known it. And that I will take with me into the night. I like best the parts of us that are contradictory and most human."

-Vera by Carol Edgarian

 

Two small ones.

 

Agates. Watercolor.

 Adventures in primitive printmaking

 Spooky time.... a glittery, felted Vagina Dentata

 

What do you do when you can’t decide which fluorescent embroidery floss color to use? Obviously, use them all.

 

 

Vesica Piscis/The Sacrament. Watercolor, ink, gouache, and gold leaf on Arches paper. 18" x 24". 2018. 

"Religious deities are often shown inside the vesica piscis, or mandorla, in artwork, as if they are looking into this world from another...

The vesica is a symbol of the spiritual portal, which emerges from the harmonious balance of the Great Polarities: intuition and intellect, knowledge and practice, yin and yang, heart and mind, heaven and earth, spirit and science, male and female, etc. The vesica piscis is literally a spiritual portal. It is through this portal that we enter into this dimension. This spiritual portal is the yoni (the female delta, the vulva, the vagina). Without this portal, we have no life. There is no other entrance into this world but through this portal."

-Excerpt from Astrotheology and Shamanism, Christianity's Pagan Roots, by Jan Irwin and Andrew Rutajit

“No wonder male religious leaders so often say that humans were born in sin—because we were born to female creatures. Only by obeying the rules of the patriarchy can we be reborn through men. No wonder priests and ministers in skirts sprinkle imitation birth fluid over our heads, give us new names, and promise rebirth into everlasting life.” - Gloria Steinem

 

Crowning. Watercolor, India ink, and gouache. 22”x30”

Yoni (Tridacna Squamosa). Watercolor on Arches Paper. 22" x 30". © Liz Darling 2018

Wombniverse/The Red Sea. Watercolor, India Ink, and Gouache. © Liz Darling 2017.

This (link right here) is an awesome podcast by Women's Liberation Radio News. You can listen to it on Soundcloud. The episode is on Women's Spirituality, but my favorite part is the segment by Sekhmet She Owl, which starts at minute 48:50. An excerpt:

"Religion is inextricable from patriarchy, and if we want to set women everywhere free from male domination and give them feminist consciousness, we have to understand what religion does to them and refute the lies that religious men tell. Religion is used to colonize women’s minds, to make them cooperative with male power. The indoctrination starts early in life for most of us. As girls, we’re forced to go to church or temple or mosque, we’re taught to pray to all-powerful, all-knowing male god, to beg him for what we need, and to feel guilty when we disobey him. We’re taught to kneel before him; submit to him, be grateful to him as the source of all goodness in our lives, and life itself. There is no equivalent reverence of a female figure anywhere. There is no female in the individual or collective imagination with such power, knowledge, or creativity. Men designed it this way, millennia ago, erasing the goddess that civilizations everywhere once worshiped.

Patriarchal religion places a male authority figure in the female psyche, leading women and girls to accept male power over them as unquestionable. Mary Daly said 'when the God is male, the male is God.' Consider how much more submissive religious women are to the men in their lives compared to secular women. Consider how much farther away women on the religious right are from feminism than liberal and leftist women and corresponding religiosity versus secularism in these two groups. While patriarchal religion is not the source of misogyny in men or women, it does an excellent job of enhancing the misogyny already there, and excusing political, cultural, and social expressions of misogyny. Belief in an omnipotent, male deity and his rules for proper living render women compliant with male authority, both in the home and in the community. This is why most religious women on the right go along with the brazen misogyny of their men. God told them to be obedient wives and daughters. Patriarchal religion is men’s fantasy of their own absolute power, control, domination, and immortality. Rather than some metaphysical truth about the universe or human beings, we should trust male religion to reveal the truth about the male psyche, male ego, and men’s deepest desires."

-Sekhmet She Owl

Dualities. India Ink. © Liz Darling 2017.

I have work in this show! Opening May 6 at Inner Space, Jersey City, NJ.