What occurs when the ladies immortalised in outdated grasp art work step out in their gilded frames and into the chaos of contemporary home existence? That’s the query artist Sarah Lightman tackles, with wit, irreverence and perception, in her exhibition Biblical Girls Getting old Disgracefully, now on at Chester Visible Arts, Grovesnor Buying groceries Centre.
In works from her Biblical Home (2021–2024) and Menstrual Hystery (2024) collection, Lightman trades halos for housekeeping, and heavenly glory for the cluttered truth of her personal on a regular basis existence. Her saints and heroines aren’t meditating in divine serenity – they’re fighting menopause, messy kitchens and midlife malaise.
With humour and intimacy, Lightman probes the gap between the idealised girls of non secular artwork and the getting old our bodies we’re taught to cover. Her characters, drawn from each the canon of western Christian artwork and the sacred Jewish texts of her upbringing, are lovingly reimagined via a feminist lens.
What if Mary hated comfortable play up to the remainder of us? What if Eve was once simply seeking to get via any other basket of laundry? What if biblical girls elderly in actual time?
With daring colors, absurdist touches and deep empathy, Biblical Girls Getting old Disgracefully reframes those archetypes for nowadays – and begins contemporary conversations about visibility, care and womanhood.
Outdated masters, new messes
In Refrigerator Frustrations (2022), Caravaggio’s Judith Beheading Holofernes (1599) turns into a scene of home dread. Judith nonetheless holds Holofernes’ severed head – however now her disaster is garage, now not salvation:
Judith can’t in finding any place within the refrigerator for her natural and contemporary reduce of Holofernes.
Refrigerator Frustrations (2022)
Courtesy of Sarah Lightman
Lightman keeps the dramatic composition of the unique however shifts its that means solely. Her watercolour medium softens the baroque oil depth, introducing levity with out shedding emotional intensity.
Right here, Mary’s serene acceptance is swapped for one thing way more visceral: she sits beside an examination desk mid heavy bleed, now not in swish give up however physically discomfort. Gabriel is long past, changed by way of a gynaecologist in latex gloves. The partitions? Tiled now not with gold leaf however with packets of All the time. That is no divine come across – simply sizzling flushes, greasy hair and hormonal chaos. No religious serenity in sight.
As a substitute of younger grace, Lightman offers us perimenopausal reality: gritty, awkward, actual.
No longer a rejection, however a rewriting
Lightman’s paintings is unabashedly feminist and unapologetically humorous – but it surely’s additionally rooted in reverence. Her reinterpretations of girls from Hebrew scripture honour the complexity of those figures and draw from the feminist Jewish custom of midrash: ingenious interpretation that fills within the biblical silences.
Lightman isn’t discarding those sacred tales: she’s inhabiting them. She paints the portions we have been by no means advised, the ideas and struggles neglected of the male-dominated canon. Her canvases ask: what if we didn’t settle for the gaps in those girls’s lives? What if we imagined them into our personal?
Context issues – and Biblical Girls Getting old Disgracefully is exhibited now not in a white-walled gallery however in Chester’s Grosvenor Precinct, having prior to now proven at Chester’s cultural centre Storyhouse. The positioning is planned. Those Madonnas and menopausal saints seem precisely the place they are living now: amongst buying groceries luggage, infant tantrums and the quiet sighs of girls maintaining all of it in combination.
Lot’s Damp Spouse (2024)
Courtesy of Sarah Lightman
Assembly Eve, Mary, Bathsheba, Susanna and Lot’s spouse in a buying groceries centre creates a surreal and poignant dissonance. It collapses the sacred and the strange, and invitations audience to peer their very own lives mirrored in those historical figures.
Messy, mortal and sumptuous
It’s a possibility, in fact, placing menopause, motherhood, grief, housekeeping and rape tradition centre degree. There’s a model of this exhibition that may have been grim. However Lightman’s palette is the rest however dour. Her watercolours are colourful and playful, her titles sharp with satire. Those girls aren’t tragic martyrs; they’re exhausted, sure, but in addition realizing, cheeky and in at the funny story.
Lightman treats artwork historical past now not as a set monument, however as a toolkit to be deconstructed and rebuilt. She offers her saints their our bodies again – baggy, sweaty, miraculous – and their company too.
What makes Biblical Girls Getting old Disgracefully so tough is its include of contradiction. It’s sacred and foolish, trustworthy and subversive, heartbreaking and hilarious. It’s, in essence, a feminist midrash in watercolour: retelling holy tales in the course of the grit and glory of recent womanhood, and maintaining them shut even because it pushes them open.
Biblical Girls Getting old Disgracefully is on show at Chester Visible Arts, Grovesnor Buying groceries Centre till July 13.
