"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.'"