Print Details:

• Museum-quality posters made on thick, durable, matte paper.

• Paper is archival and acid-free.

• Unframed prints arrive rolled up in a protective tube.

Frame Details:

• Alder, Semi-hardwood frame

• Black in color

• .75” thick

• Acrylite front protector

• Lightweight

• Hanging hardware included

• Made in the USA

From the Artist:

As I worked through the creative process for this image, I was talking to my mother and showing her my inspiration board: images of babies in the womb, spinning or cuddling. She said that John dancing for joy in his mother’s womb is one of her favorite biblical images. I thought back to my study abroad in Glasgow, Scotland at the Glasgow School of Art. I spent every day in a studio designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Through windows the height of almost two stories, light poured into the room. 

I was interested in childbirth that year. I asked the local hospital if I could view one. They said, no, legitimately citing privacy concerns. Childbirth is rightfully a protected and private time—a time when women, the possessors of the womb, choose to use their bodies for the delivery of the children of God. As a woman in my early twenties, I had no plans of having children anytime soon. Truly, I was intrigued by the way we hide the earthy, natural, bloody parts of the process. All semester I painted fetuses, newborns crowning, mothers birthing alone. They were dancing in the womb. They were emerging from the womb. They were patterns in a collage of orphaned children due to the AIDS epidemic. They were an American flag interwoven with articles of the strain of American military action on children overseas. They were newborns, still bloody, painted on patterned fabric with the stories of Peter Rabbit and the cow jumping over the moon. I even made a paint by number children’s book explaining the stages of childbirth. The clash of a facade of perfection and the tangible reality was and is ever-present in my every day. 

Here the globe is drawn as the background flow of the image. This long view of the world acknowledges the earthy, bloody, tangible, pouring-out reality that Mary and Elizabeth will soon embody to bear their sons. There is so much liquid everywhere. The central story of the text emerges as John dances with joy in his mother’s womb of this world. Around him the patterns of his baptisms flow outward into the miracles of Jesus, woven into the flow of landforms and waters on the map.

Comparison is the thief of joy, my cousin tells me. God’s children need us to dance for joy when we encounter one another. Where in my daily routines can I remove the facade of perfection, or break through it, and embrace the tangible reality of a beautiful and wonderful, earthy joy?

—Hannah Garrity