Erica Kelly Martin

A Bee in the Rose

“I would not live as they wished me to.” — Madeline Miller, Circe

I started this project while reading novels rewriting the stories of women, including Madeline Miller’s Circe, Natalie Haynes’s Stone Blind, and the wider current of contemporary fiction that has been turning the old stories inside out. Reading them, I kept catching myself imagining further: a different ending, a different meaning, a refusal placed where the myth had wanted submission. We have been handed stories told and retold that define our roles. They shape what we are allowed to want, and what we are punished for wanting. What if we took a second look? Athena and Artemis. Circe and Persephone. Medusa and Eve. Boudicca and Cailleach. Magdalena and Morrigan. Calliope and Ophelia. La Malinche. Oshun. Some of these figures are myth, some are history, some are still being prayed to. All of them were assigned roles – victim, temptress, monster, mother. None of them surrendered their agency.

I wanted to invert the stories, to imagine a viewer with a different gaze than the one we’ve been taught, and through that inversion to move from portrait to archetype. Conventional portraiture lights its subjects to be looked at as particular people at particular times. I worked the other direction.

And yet, I am drawn to the moment that the original telling moves past too quickly, the choice not taken, the silence that gets read as consent, the punishment that gets called justice. In making these images, I am asking what else the myths can hold.