From the artist: “In 2010 I visited Rome for the first time and came across a retrospective of the work of Lucas Cranach at the Galleria Borghese. I felt myself drawn to his full-length male and female nudes—Adam and Eve, Venus with Cupid—in terms of pose, background, format, and scale. As I wandered in the Borghese after viewing the show I realized how the characters and portrayals of figures from Greek and Roman myths overlapped with the saints from my Catholic upbringing and how the full-length Renaissance nude paintings referred back to the sculpture of Classical antiquity. In this series I have explored the dialogue between male and female and the way meaning is found through the gentle rake of light on flesh, the bend of an ankle or knee, the tip of a pelvis, the dip of a shoulder or the turn of a neck. I see them as palimpsests, where each contemporary photographic image has in it the shadow of both the Renaissance painting and the Classical sculpture.”
