Wolfmother – Artwork
Textile, wool, gold, leaf, oil pastels.
50 x 100 cm, 2024.
Wolfmother is a textile banner in which softness, discipline, myth, and politics coexist without hierarchy. A pink leather ground carries a stitched wolf icon, needle-felted teats, and a rigid row of identical German Shepherd badges.
The wolf enters the work as a figure of Roman mythology; the she-wolf who nurses Romulus and Remus stands at the origin of empire. In Greco-Roman religious practice, it was closely associated with Artemis, whose priestesses were described in historical sources as kynágides—“hunting women” or “hunting bitches.” During ceremonies, they wore animal skins and masks, occupying a liminal position between wilderness and culture, instinct and social law. The wolf functioned as a mediator: neither fully inside nor outside the symbolic order.
This contrasts with the German Shepherd badges embedded in the work. Historically bred for obedience and discipline, and later instrumentalized within police and state apparatuses, the shepherd dog, a descendant of the wolf, stands for patriarchal systems of control and regulated protection. Its serial repetition introduces a visual logic of standardization and authority that counters the irregular, archaic forms above.
Wolfmother holds these elements in quiet tension. Nourishment and command, ritual memory and institutional order, intimacy and power remain unresolved. The work does not resolve this friction; it preserves it—allowing myth, history, and material presence to press against one another in a single, charged surface.
