Our Lady: en feu (Notre Dame: on fire) is a significant new body of work by painter and colourist Kirsty Martinsen. Inspired by the images of Notre Dame Cathedral ablaze in 2019, the work explores powerful moments within recent history: the #metoo movement, recent political conflict, human-induced climate change, the Australian bushfires, and most recently COVID-19.
Photos: Morgan Sette
Image: Flèche en Fue (je T’aime), 2019, pastel on earth ground on paper, 24cm x 32.5cm framed (Photographer: Alex Makeyev).
Our Lady appears with pastel drawings of the Notre Dame fires, all individually framed by Tom Borgas, and others of the Bushfires, Australian Native Flowers series, and Chernobyl and Gaza as examples of a human population hellbent on destruction. The scale of these disasters are totally diminished by the enormity of what is happening to the world currently. The burning of an 800 year old church is almost trivial in the face of a worldwide pandemic that has irrevocably altered everything. This body of work is an invaluable memento of life as we know it that’s gone forever. It questions what humans actually respect and value, and the state of the anthropogenic world we live in.
⏤ Kirsty Martinsen
Artist statement
I’ve been a painter for 20 years and consider myself a colourist. I’m interested in the issues of climate change and human relationships. ‘Our Lady: en feu’ is a series of recent drawings that began when I saw the colourful flames and smoke of the burning Notre Dame cathedral. I immediately connected them to the naked crucified woman I was working on. The naked figure was for me a burning spire. Witnessing the spire and cathedral burning, a Parisian bystander said it was “significant beyond its religious meaning”. I was left pondering how the world would be today if Jesus was a woman.
Image: Flèche en Fue III, 2019, pastel on earth ground on paper, 33cm x 45.5cm framed (Photographer: Alex Makeyev).