A MIRROR OF SIMPLE SOULS

A Mirror of Simple Souls is a video and projected light installation. The title of the work is drawn from the 14th century mystical text of Marguerite de Porète. This work emerged from a study of the writings of multiple female medieval mystics and is centered around the thesis that women who were personally able to write their own accounts of their own mystical experiences, focused on the body as a means to access and express interiority and endeavor towards a unity with the divine. In contrast, texts authored by male confessors about female experiences, rejected the body as unholy and threatening. A Mirror of Simple Souls implicates and revels in the physical as a means to access the immaterial. The projected video features a shadow figure encountering itself in a world of refracted light. At the same time, viewers’ shadows are projected onto and implicated within the projection surface, inviting a sense of wonder.