“nothers” (Installation detail)

“nothers”, An Installation, consists of 365 individual double-faced terracotta pieces. Each is marked with a gold leaf Jewish Star of David on one side and Khachkar, Armenian Cross, on the opposite side. The installation was hung across the gallery space in twelve lines, the number of pieces in each line corresponded to the number of days in a calendar month, e.g. 31 in the first line corresponding to the number of days in January, etc.

The installation references a commitment by Medieval Jewish women to nurse their infants for a period of 24 months and their use of Christian women as wet nurses (an arrangement that sometimes worked in the reverse: Jewish wet nurses for Christian women unable to nurse) when a mother was unable to nurse her child. The period of 24 months was determined to give a child the best possible chance for survival during a period when infant mortality was very high.

The piece also references the intimacy that could be found between and among Jewish and Christian women during the Middle Ages.

Please read the exhibit brochure text (found in WORKS 2010) for more of the artist’s thoughts on this work.