Miraculous Image of the Immaculate Conception… 19.097
Original painting, included in my solo exhibition Slow Creep at Project 78 Gallery. The full title is: ‘Miraculous Image of the Immaculate Conception, the Blessed Virgin Mary in the Crystal Mountain 19.097’
Acrylic ink and gouache on board
186 x 240mm
2024
In the spring of 2024, I plotted a line of latitude (50.8518) through Project 78 Gallery on the south coast of England and followed it eastward online, creating a route
for a hypothetical circumnavigation—a virtual journey that would yield the imagery from which to make an exhibition. The impossible tour crossed 19 countries and two oceans—traversing cities, agricultural land, wilderness, mountains and lakes while locating multiple sites of cultural production, extractivism, protest, conflict, dispossession, extraterrestrial exploration, leisure and recreation.
Read more at https://jamieatherton.com/slow-creep/
One morning in May 2019, just past six, psychotherapist Elżbieta Podleśna was woken by police officers. Following a search of her apartment in the small Polish town of Płock, they confiscated her computer, phone and a stack of floppy discs. Elżbieta was taken to the police station and charged with offending religious freedoms, a
crime punishable at the time by up to two years imprisonment.
A month or so earlier, Elżbieta, an already well-known civil rights activist who’d organised nationwide protests against abortion bans in 2016, had distributed posters and stickers featuring Our Lady of Czestochowa (also known as the Black Madonna of Częstochowa) around Płock. The crowns and angels adorning the Madonna’s halo and that of her infant son had been replaced with the horizontal rainbow stripes of the Pride flag. Elżbieta’s campaign was in response to an Easter display in the town that listed sins such as ‘LGBT’ and ‘gender.’
The icon, whose Latin title translates as ‘Miraculous Image of the Immaculate Conception, the Blessed Virgin Mary in the Crystal Mountain,’ resides in the Jasna Góra Monastery in the town of Częstochowa, four kilometres south of the line. One of the many legends surrounding the icon traces its origins to Luke the Evangelist, who is said to have painted it on a cedar tabletop from the Holy Family house. The monastery is a popular pilgrimage destination for Polish Catholics and a nine-day trek from Warsaw has taken place every August since 1711, culminating in participants
traversing the anterior of the shrine on their knees.
The Madonna with rainbow flag became a widely reproduced symbol of protest following Elżbieta’s arrest, much evident that year at Częstochowa’s second annual Equality march.
