Author: adriamagrath

The Assumption of the Virgin is a work designed for Assumption Village in St John’s Oregon, and was commissioned for this project by Rev Michael Maslowsky in the summer of 2001 and installed the following spring.

This piece grew out of my desire to depict a very different sort of Virgin and Assumption than that of historical tradition, a scene usually of deathbed sorrow and angels in ascension with a pious and youthful Virgin wafting heavenward in a cloud.   Instead here, Mary settled into her years, her face has lined with the years of hard life in the desert.  She is full of the weight of the world and the sorrow of her life, and yet wise and charged with faith.   She steps forward from one world to the next, one foot on the edge of a precipice, proudly and without a hint of doubt, absolutely confident in gods grace that will keep her from falling into oblivion.   To me she becomes the embodiment of absolute, rock solid faith in the face of a hard life and times that call faith into deepest question. 

The symbolism of the crescent moon goes back millennia, linking Mary with the earliest stirrings of religious feeling in humanity and the first known forms of the divine feminine.  It was my intent to link this moon symbol with a more modern sense of our nearest planetary partner, thus bringing the symbolism into a more contemporary form.

This piece was three years in the making.  It originated in 1999 as a third and culminating element in a cycle of work installed at St Anthony’s Catholic Church in Portland Oregon.  Those pieces, a Stations of the Cross and a Resurrection, emphasized the end of Jesus’ life and his triumph in the afterlife.  The Virgin, eventually to be called Our Lady of Life, was an attempt to round the cycle back to the beginning, to the conception of the savior almost as a rebirth.  Rather than an Annunciation, or a Madonna and Child, however, I was drawn to the human story of the Mother of God, specifically the miracle of one life coming to be within another.

I am intensely interested in the very human condition and psychology of Mary at this time.   It cannot have been an easy situation!  A very young girl, perhaps thirteen, unmarried, and yet in a family way.  Her guardian and husband-to-be, Joseph, protesting to the community that the child she carried was not his, had yet to hold faith with her in her unlikely story.  Were he to cast her out, her future, and that of her child could only be grim.  I imagine her at this time very ambivalent about this little life she had found herself charged with.  I see her walking in the wilderness of doubt and fear in the early months of her pregnancy.  It is impossible to see a way out.  And then there is a movement.   Mary stops and feels the baby in her womb reaching out to touch her from within.  She lays her hand against the palpitation.  She feels for perhaps the first time the full presence of this child, a miracle only a mother can know.  Suddenly there is a feeling of great calm and wonderment.  Everything will be all right, for her, for the child, and for all of humanity.  She looks up from her own belly to catch the eye of the first person she sees, smiling outward that secret serene knowledge of faith.

This work can be seen at Assumption Village in St Johns, The Community Center in Corvallis, and the site for which it was originally designed, the grotto at St Anthony’s Village in Portland.  

Michael Magrath, January 2003