Mallet and Stake and Head (Yael and Sisera)

Mallet and Stake and Head was inspired by Harold Edgerton’s Bullet and Apple, 1964, as a result of ArtsWorcester’s Call for Art in conjunction with the Fitchburg Art Museum. And then serendipitously last month I interviewed Carol Bailey of Bryley Systems whose father worked for Harold Edgerton in Cambridge. She spoke of Harold being a regular guy who answered his office’s phone and of her dad tinkering on electronics in the family basement. Her stories brought back good feelings of my father working in our basement when I was growing up (and I thought of me working in our family home basement now). Work from Home, as they now call it, is Romantic, ain’t it? Maybe it was in the will to keep going with my brutal interpretaion of Harold’s photo — but I think my conversation with Carol contributed to my approach to the material.

Harold Edgerton’s photo suggested an assassination. But Edgerton does not show the shooter, suggesting a beyond-time, forever action. In parallel, my painting (that keeps Edgerton’s palette) shows a Mary/female-divine piercer with metal weapons approaching a vulnerable, senseless head. This Mary was inspired by Catholic imagery, like Raphael and Velasquez, because I wanted to put this venerated symbol of good into the position of one of the relatively few female heroes of the Tanach: Yael.

In the Haftarah for Parasha Beshallakh, Judges 5, the Song of Devorah, it says this about Yael:

Most blessed among women is Yael, the wife of Heber the Kenite, most blessed of tent-dwelling women.

He [Sisera] asked for water, and she gave him milk. In a magnificent bowl she brought him curds. [Sisera then fell asleep {says so earlier}.]

She reached for the tent peg, her right hand for the workman’s hammer.

She struck Sisera and crushed his skull; she shattered and pierced his temple. At her feet he collapsed, he fell, there he lay still.

I hope my unease with the story comes through in the painting. At the least the story challenges the idea of what attributes are feminine.