Aurum
I have been asked about the image (and name) on my blog. It's from my Masters of Fine Art final project. I was painting and studying female iconography and got very interested in the gold halos in religious paintings and also in Bizantine icons. I had previously created some work around the Madonna /Whore dichotomy which led to painting halos on ordinary women (the idealization of the feminine). This then led to looking at gold as a subject in itself, and someone along the way told me that Aurum was gold in Latin. Aurum/aura...there I was painting auras(halos!!). In the Periodic Table the symbol for gold/aurum is a circle with a dot at the center. In Astrology that is the symbol for the sun. The sun in Astrology represents the Self. Meanwhile I has started reading about Alchemy (as part of the iconography around gold). According to Carl Jung, in Alchemy, the transformation from base metal to Gold is a metaphor for the transformation of the Self. So....long stor