Art at times originates from pain – a torment that owes its origins to salient episodes in an artist’s childhood. However, artist Nik Keter defies this label as she maintains that, although she has gone through her fair share of it, this does not define her as an artist. “I was ‘lost’ and then I was ‘found’. I could not have come up with this exhibition if I was still in the throes of my trauma, it is because I was found by Mary, the mother of Jesus, that I could produce such works,” she clarifies.

Artists like Frida Kahlo integrated anguish in self-portraits, indeed as autobiographies documenting trauma. Besides the Mexican artist’s physical frailties and her inability to conceive, her youth was challenged psychologically by a Mexican Revolution that created havoc and destroyed lives while sowing uncertainty all around. These eventually became the underlying themes of her whole artistic oeuvre, ones that also declared her a very original, chromatically rich but melancholic artist.

Marija Reġina

Keter’s childhood similarly has a very interesting story to tell, a narrative that sought an escape from her isolation at home by losing herself in books and reading away her loneliness. Her parents, both yoga teachers, instilled in the young girl an interest in Far-Eastern philosophies and religions through which the child enjoyed the comfort of solitude and introspection. This was fuel that fired the child’s imagination and fostered her story-making abilities. “I loved to read tales of Hindu myth and passed the time with tales of Krishna and Ganesh living around me,” she affirms.

However, unsavoury episodes sullied her memories of school: “I was bullied relentlessly and the cruelty I received from children tore me apart, physically and mentally,” Keter affirms, and, because of this, she even had to change schools when she was just nine years old.

This tapestry of contrasting emotions amid the backdrop of religious overbearance provoked in her a diffidence towards any authority. “I questioned authority constantly, was a huge pain for every priest or teacher that came across me. My mantra at the time was ‘Why?’ I wanted to know it all,” she introspectively remarks.

This continuous quest for answers to the questions she asked, unfathomable on most occasions, could have kindled the embers of an art that was to eventually explore themes that are very existential and deeply spiritual.

I’ve never seen Mary portrayed as anything other than youthful and beautiful, and I wanted to show a different kind of beauty, one that comes with maturity and wisdom

Recalling her primary school years, Keter reminisces: “I vividly remember refusing to do the sign of the cross correctly. I raised my left hand and recited: ‘In the Name of the Mother, and of the Daughter, and of the Holy Spirit’…which made the teacher call my mother, horrified, and give me a ‘B’ in religion on my end-of-year report.”

She showed a non-conformist sensitivity towards Christian iconography, especially towards a feminine version of a religion that emphatically celebrates its male protagonists and favours a male-dominated hierarchy in its temporal structure.

Marija Duluri

Keter’s prayers must have struck her peers as decidedly off-kilter. Such a perspective provided the young girl with a meaning that transcended genders, that of a female goddess-head and female offspring, accompanied by a gender-ambiguous Holy Spirit – a trinity that would have inspired an alternative religion and scripture, or rather, a different version of the male-dominated one.

Some memories get etched onto one’s subconscious, out of which they occasionally resurface. The artist talks about one particularly eloquent childhood experience, a spiritual epiphany or a revelation of sorts:

“There is a chapel dedicated to Our Lady of Sorrows just behind my childhood home, and inside, there is this beautiful, life-size statue of Our Lady, her heart pierced by seven stiletto daggers, tears streaming down her face. I used to go after school every day to look at her and say my incomplete, naïve rosary, because I had never learned to say it correctly.

“I felt like she understood me, and in the flickering candlelight, the statue looked alive. On one particular day, I couldn’t stand watching her cry anymore, and I cried with her and begged to take away her pain, and this small dark chapel became a womb to me. From that day onwards a grace was given to me.”

All of these experiences and concepts somehow found their way in the Maltese artist’s idiosyncratic iconography that draws on the religious and the intimately biographical. All that is manifestly feminine, such as the Mother of God and Mother Earth, constitute themes that Keter investigates in her debut exhibition. “My exhibition is about joy, love and devotion, and about the rehabilitation of Mary as a divine figure in her own right,” she remarks.

According to the exhibition’s mission statement, this is an exhibition which “reveals the transformations of the Mother – drawing a parallel between the seasonal transformations of Mother Earth and the archetypal transformations of the Mother, using religious iconography and poetry (the transformation of language) as a vehicle.”

In the name of the Mother.. and of the Daughter ... is a chromatic display of a flourishing humanity that owes its origins to the biological mother, the life-giver, the nurturer; a Christianity that owes a lot to Mary, the girl who conceived and gave birth to the Son of God. Keter defines Mary as “a human-Goddess who raises and nourishes the man-God; a spiritual equal.” She adds: “Christ in his infancy would not have reached adulthood if it wasn’t for her protective and nurturing role.” A funeral of a distant relative and the general callous disenchantment of the congregation towards the corpse in the coffin had been an eye-opener and a trigger to make her realise and ponder on how so easily a human being can, on all levels, be transformed into nothingness.

“It was at that point that I understood the purpose that Mary had given me so long ago, in that dark chapel; her divine femininity, her unconditional maternal love, was the answer to this masculinist apathy. My dream is to create a community with a strong feminine baseline, where people can unite and escape this system that is so incredibly oppressive and miserable, so that She can scoop us up like children and nourish us,” the artist concludes as she invites the art-loving public to partake in her artistic journey, these poignant chapters of her autobiography.

In the name of the Mother.. and of the Daughter.., curated by Art Sweven and hosted by Il-Kamra ta’ Fuq, Mqabba will be open until September 14. COVID-19 mitigating rules apply.