(141) Rose Agnew – Mrs Ramsay (Australia)
(1050) Yasemin Senel – Ishtar (Ornaments from the royal graves at Ur) (Belgium)
About this Artwork
Price: $300 AUD
Mrs Ramsay is a whimsical reflection on the famous “Ram in a Thicket” sculpture. The meanings attributed to this mysterious object are bound up with so many western ideologies and mythologies – from the potential sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham, to the search for wisdom, to the rise of individualism in western civilizations. It is this notion of seeking knowledge that I have illustrated. Here, the nosy Mrs Ramsay peers through some scraggy branches to find out what’s going on next door. The unlikely posture and craning pose of the sculpture really appealed to me and suggested a very human inquisitiveness. Contemporary analysis tells us that the animal depicted is a goat, not a sheep, particularly a Markhor goat, a breed renowned for their antipathy towards snakes.
My lonely Mrs Ramsay could also be looking for her companion. She would do well to travel from room 56 in the British Museum to Philadelphia where the complementary figure resides. It seems mournfully appropriate that she forever peer out since being removed from her ancient burial place in Ur. How often do we feel the true meaning of things would be clearer if the context were different? indeed, it took me a while to realize i knew the objects shown on my encyclopedia page. Indeed, I had seen them in the British Museum and listened to a podcast about them on the BBC, but it was only when I read the title “Ram in a Thicket” that I put it all together.
About Rose
Rose Agnew is a multi-disciplinary artist whose practice includes painting, sculpture, gold and silversmithing, botanical illustration, and embroidery. Rose is also a published writer, sometimes piano player and maker of ornate and whimsical cakes. And while it is challenging to find a defining descriptor for her work, it is safe to say that Rose has an intense love of beauty and the practice of making, both of which are fueled by an equally passionate inquiry into our shared world and human experiences. Rose is fascinated by the world and how we make sense of it. From the stories we tell ourselves, our dreams and our lies, to our retelling of shared cultural histories – these are the things that shape our views of the past and into the future.
Link to Rose’s Art Aviso Profile HERE
Rose was provided with the following page from Newnes’ Pictorial Knowledge Encyclopedia:
Newnes’ Pictorial Knowledge Encyclopedia
Volume 9
The story of the early civilisation in the worlds history. How learning and understanding spread from the Mediterranean
In Ancient UR of the Chaldees
About this Artwork
Price: 1350 EUR
The starting point for the creation of this work is the set of jewellery and ornaments found in a temple dedicated to the goddess Ishtar, one of the most important deities in Mesopotamia. She was the mother-goddess and symbolized fertility and fecundity. I felt very much in tune with this subject since mythology, goddess figures and fertility symbols are always very present in my work. Being born in Turkey but having studied arts in Belgium, my work is deeply inspired by cultural heritage of Middle East and Western Europe, how it meets and mixes, how it enriches each other. I have always felt deeply connected to ancient Sumerian and Babylonian civilizations, in their legends and art forms. I was therefore very excited when I received the plate about Ur and the Chaldees, and couldn’t wait to start working on this fantastic topic. This work is the first of a series I will work on in the coming weeks.
About Yasemin
Yasemin Senel was born in Turkey in 1953 and she lives and works now in Brussels, Belgium. She creates strong figurative artwork, personal and oneiric, sensitive and fierce at the same time. Her work offers fanciful childbirth linking humans to their animal alter egos, reinventing powerful founding myths. Yasemin Senel shakes up the iconography of myths to make them give up the soul in the jubilation of the gesture of painting. Between votive reminiscences and shamanistic rites, her playful trance disrupts gender conventions and plunders the figurative resources of a subject-pretext. The colour from which she extracts rare harmonies is always at the forefront of her preoccupations, exalted by colliding arrangements of planes with multiple reading spaces. Depending on the flashes of both cerebral and emotional grasping, scale discrepancies are frequent, as is the alternation of pictorial references that oscillate between esotericism and celebrations of fertility. Finally, the linear line brings the paradoxical counterpoint, unifying and finalizing the composition in a definitively moving register.
She graduated from the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts of Liège (Belgium) in 1978 and shows her works since 1977 (notably in FIAC Paris, Chicago, Paris and Luxembourg more recently). She makes paintings on canvas or paper, and drawings.
Link to Yasemin’s Art Aviso profile HERE
Yasemin was provided with the following page from Newnes’ Pictorial Knowledge Encyclopedia:
Volume 9
The story of the early civilisation in the worlds history.
In Ancient UR of the Chaldees