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Majak Bredell creates hybrid figures of Mary Magdalene Article Image

Majak Bredell creates hybrid figures of Mary Magdalene

Posted on 4 August 2016

Majak Bredell re-interprets Mary Magdalene through blending the sacred and profane, Christian and pagan, West and East, history and mythology. But - who was Mary Magdalene? Bredell answers this question through repeatedly re-creating and re-imagining her figure on various canvases, folio artist books and sketches.

"My journey with Mary Magdalene began twenty years ago when I lived in New York. The works that surround us grew out of a larger body of work, POST-CHRISTIAN ALTER IMAGES - my feminist re-visioning and re-thinking of the relationship of the female body to the sacred," states Bredell. Her work surrounds the marginalized representation of the goddess, the witch, and the female body and through her research, she explores and re-interprets the representation of women.

"The works represents my own labors away from the common assumptions projected onto Magdalene and depictions made of her...," says Bredell, "Un-layering Mary Magdalene places me in the role of an archeologist of ideas and images, but unlike an academic scholar - as an artist - I am at liberty to apply symbolic understandings to this enigmatic figure that collapse into each other while I indulge in cross-cultural borrowing."

Bredell peels away many layers of thought that have shrouded Mary Magdalene in the course of two millennia raising questions of her ever-changing image and offers viewers room for personal and transformative interpretation.