Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy, 2025
Cobalt underglaze on porcelain tile · 12-tile panel
There is a woman at the centre of the most told story in Western history who was erased so thoroughly that most of us didn’t notice she was missing. What does it mean to love someone so completely that you stay when everyone else runs — and be remembered for the wrong thing entirely? She was at the cross when the disciples fled. She came first to the tomb. First to see him risen. First to be sent to tell. The Church called her a prostitute for fifteen centuries rather than call her what she was.
The 12 tiles are the 12 disciples — each a fragment, incomplete alone. Together they make her whole. She becomes the 13th. The witness. The one who did not run. When we think of loyalty, devotion to a righteous cause, it conjures thoughts of military, crusade like submission. Maybe it was always feminine bravery we modelled.
At her waist she holds the blood egg — the red egg she is said to have brought before Caesar as proof of the resurrection, which turned crimson in his hand. But the egg is also a birth symbol. There is a legend older than the Church’s comfort with it — that she fled to France not alone, but carrying his child. That the cave was not exile but sanctuary.
What if they just loved each other. Not cosmic, theological, incomprehensible love — but the warm, specific, entirely human kind.
The reference is Guido Cagnacci’s Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy — the arched throat, the surrender to something larger than doctrine. His vision: Magdalene in her cave in the south of France, lifted by angels seven times a day to hear the music of heaven. Which is, when you say it plainly, a completely unhinged story that roughly a billion people have quietly filed away as sacred truth.
That arched throat, that head thrown back — is this the ecstasy of divine communion? A woman in labour in a cave in France? Or the ecstasy of two people who were, before anything else, simply devoted to each other in the way that human bodies understand devotion?
The Church made her a prostitute so we wouldn’t ask.
We are asking.
Losing My Religion · Northern Contemporary Gallery · Toronto
