"The Cup"

This piece, which was completed in early 2006, served as

promotional artwork for The Cup, a play written and directed

by Kate Malin. I drew heavily upon the play's rich imagery for

the piece. The following are comments I made at the time

regarding this artwork and Kate's play.

"My friend Kate Malin, who currently serves as the Curate and

Assistant to the Rector at Christ Church Bronxville in

Bronxville, New York, wrote The Cup as her senior honors

dissertation at seminary. An actress and playwright before

entering General Theological Seminary, Kate wanted to write

a play that addressed the issues of female-ness and

femininity in society and in the church.

"Kate writes, 'The Cup reflects a tension I perceive between

liturgy as performed art and church as a living testament of

faith. My desire in creating this piece was to invite a dialogue

between text and gesture, and to look at women's bodies in

worship using the image of "cup" as a unifying theme. The

Cup explores the passion, violence, and love a woman

encounters along her journey of faith while seeking to lift up

the common human experience of fragmentation, limited

understanding, and a shared desire for wholeness.'

"The script for The Cup draws on a variety of texts that are

sacred and secular, ancient and contemporary, poetry and

prose. For the promotional artwork, I built a similar collage of

textual references which made up the play.

"Each frame of the body (ear, mouth, breasts, hands, and

womb) has a relationship to the symbol of the cup and is the

theme of each of the five acts that were used in the play. For

example, Kate quotes Rosario Castellanos' poem, 'The

Splendor of Being,' when she states, 'In cupped hands the

held universe reposes.' In another instance, Kate sites the

Psalms with 'Thou anointest my head with oil, my cup

overflows.'"