Julia Rooney
Eve Alone, 2017, Oil pant and photo collage on plaster, with chiffon overlay, 33.02 x 43.18 cm, Collection of artist ?; ©️ Julia Rooney; Image courtesy Julia Rooney and Yale Divinity School
She, Herself
Commentary by Xiao Situ
In Eve Alone, Julia Rooney reproduces the face of Eve from Masaccio’s Expulsion from the Garden of Eden, a Renaissance fresco in the Brancacci Chapel of Santa Maria del Carmine, Florence. Rooney’s version leaves out Adam, the angel, and the landscape. Instead, the work is all about Eve, featuring her face painted on a rectangle of plaster. Tiny images of Eve’s body are scattered along the perimeter, interspersed by architectural elements that evoke the moulding above the gate of Eden in Masaccio’s fresco. The addition of a layer of translucent fabric visually softens the hardness of the plaster and adds an aura of mystery and delicacy to Eve’s face.
Taken out of context, some might interpret Eve’s facial expression not exclusively as despair, but perhaps as ecstasy. In Rooney’s own words, Eve Alone ‘is a meditation on the multivalence of Eve’ (Rooney 2018). The work ruminates on Eve’s complexity as an individual apart from the context of God, Adam, the Fall, and the Expulsion.
Although Shelomith bat Dibri is the only named woman in Leviticus and thus visible within Israel’s chronicles, she appears in the text in terms of her relationship to men. From the three verses in which her name appears (24:10–12), we can glean the following information: Shelomith was an Israelite woman. Her father was Dibri from the tribe of Dan. She bore a son with an Egyptian man. Her son got into a fight with an Israelite man in the Sinai camp, cursed God’s name, and was thus brought before Moses and put into custody.
In Leviticus as well as in canonical rabbinical texts, Shelomith is known primarily as the mother of an accused and imprisoned man. The fullness of her life story—the multivalence of her character and experiences—are reduced to an offence linked to her son. In contemporary colloquial speech, Shelomith might be talked about as ‘that woman’ whose son did ‘that thing’ (Gafney 2017: 127). As with Rooney’s Eve Alone, it requires the imagination of artists, scholars, and readers to create spaces for Shelomith to be explored as a complex woman whose life may have been more than the selective circumstances narrated in the Scriptures.
References
Rooney, Julia. 2018. ‘Eve Alone and Portalscreen: Artist’s Statement’, available at https://divinity.yale.edu/news/eve-alone-and-portalscreen [Accessed 18 August 2022]
Gafney, Wilda C. 2017. Womanist Midrash: A Reintroduction to the Women of the Torah and the Throne (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press)
