His fleece was white as snow
“Why does the lamb love Mary so?”
But still it lingered near
“Why, Mary loves the lamb, you know?”
“Why does the lamb love Mary so?”
Okay, I’m gonna be direct about this but there really isn’t some deep religious meaning to my work…its just in your face plain sex, BDSM and satanic goats. Pure trashy art, my friend~
I started this project with the idea that the rhyme “Mary Had A Little Lamb” was actually really ambiguous and started working around the way certain verses sound when spoken without any context. I also brought in my love for trashy things, “poor taste” such as using the aesthetic of exploitation movie posters. Mary and the little lamb seem to be associated with a certain form of innocence so I wanted to reverse that as well. The way I went about it was to imagine if the rhyme was read to a blind person and what could the blind person have imagined. Thus, I interpreted the rhyme as Mary and her “little” lamb having a really close relationship…really close…maybe a bit too close. I was also interested in the topic of beastality so I saw Mary and the lamb as sexual partners. The idea of lamb also brought into mind the dynamics of the dominanating and the submissive so I decided to include BDSM images as well. The little lamb of hers could be a sort of slave, a submissive toy to play with, thus “everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go”. Yet, I was also interested in the topic of the lamb/ goat as a satanic symbol so for some of the compositions, I reversed the dynamics and have a satanic goat represented by the goat mask instead. The goat mask also adds on to BDSM look. In contrast, I added the visual of the Virgin Mary overlooking a figure in bondage to add on to the idea. I also played with the visual of the lamb’s backside with its tail that resembles a male phallic and incorporated elements of psychedelic art too. Keep up with the use of double meaning to images, I added a flower in the centre of the lamb legs which also happens to resemble a beautiful vagina. Further down, I worked on the theme of ambiguity and censorship as I felt that Mary had a little lamb could have been a censored version of Mary and her lamb’s deep relationship instead portraying a nice innocent image of a girl and her lamb. The last image pretty much sums it all: laugh in the face of censor ship, forget about subtlety, just show it all.