The Goddess Project at The Malta Art Biennale 2024

The Goddess Project comprises a collective of small female terracotta torsos, referencing Maltese Neolithic statuettes (from c. 3300 - 2450 BC), specifically the ‘Tarxien and Mnajdra women’, which are thought to be self-portraits made during pregnancy and offered as votives for success in childbirth.

Made soon after I first became a mother, I made hundreds, working fast. A cathartic process after a difficult birth, it was a way of processing my frustrations with new motherhood and my evolving feminist ideas. Modern ideas of feminine beauty - as thin, young etc - are subverted for contorted spines, scars, ageing skin, breasts and bodies of all sizes - a reclamation of the body, agency and stories of womanhood.

The goddesses were initially autobiographical, forming a collection of my fractured and evolving identities in relation to my body - they were all versions of me.

Yet with time, when seen as a whole, this is a community of women, an antidote to the isolation of new motherhood. The piece asks us to consider the relationship between the individual and the collective. By lining them up in the hundreds, the pieces allude to generations of women; ancestors to hold the vulnerable new mother and a line of women capable of evolving and transforming.

Placed along the centre of this imposing corridor, in a space of male political power, the small figurines contrast with the excesses of the space and the armories that surround them.

Photos by Lisa Attard