It all started with Iris, and ended with my senior show with live models on stage in the center of the Woods-Gerry gallery. I screen printed, embroidered, dyed, stitched, and sewed rhinestones for costumes that attempted to answer my question, "If ancient goddesses were alive today, what would they be wearing?" Athena wore black leather with spikes and studs. Persephone was in velvet, black and deep purple, sprinkled with tiny mirrors and hand painted skeletons rising from the Underworld. Omphale wore green and gold, silkscreened in honor of the lion's skin she wore with a texture made by putting my hair into the xerox machine.
I couldn't have known then that the question would take me further than fabric and deep into the mountains of Oaxaca to the Virgin of Juquila, in a row boat on the Nile to the Temple of Isis in Egypt, on a tuk-tuk to see the Apsara at Angkor Wat in Cambodia, or a cable car to the top of Mount Koya in Japan to the tiny temple of Nyonindo.
For a thousand years women, though they practiced Buddhism, were not allowed into the temples on the top of sacred Koya-san, so they made trails through the forest in order to get as close to the holy grounds as they could. They built small temples at the end of those trails, at the border of where they were allowed to go. Nyonindo is the only one that remains. I lit a candle there in honor of those women waiting on the edge.
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