ARTWORK SUMMARY

Pandora’s story is all too familiar. She was given a beautiful jar for a wedding gift, with strict instructions not to open it under any circumstance. But as the myth would have it, she opened the jar out of curiosity, releasing all evil and miseries contained within it into the world, and something extra – the spirit of hope which lay at the bottom. The phrase “to open Pandora’s box,” therefore, means to perform a seemingly small action but that turns out to have unforeseen far-reaching negative consequences.

My painting features a woman half-disrobed, her womb cut open, heart in one hand and a bird-faced offspring in her other arm. This alludes to the creative process of drawing inspiration from past experiences in order to give birth to a new piece. The seemingly harmless act of opening old wounds with the objective of recounting sometimes painful stories serves as both a catharsis and a Pandora’s box of some sort to the storyteller, but at the same time, imparts a glimmer of hope to the spectator who empathizes with the piece as it mirrors his/herself.

ARTIST: Katrina Pallon
TITLE: Pandoras Box
MEDIUM: Oil on Canvas
DIMENSIONS: 122 x 91.5 cm
DATE: 2014