In the Pacha Mama: earth realm series, Lynda Frese uses her own photography (digital and film-based) and other found printed material and combines these with egg tempera painting. Most of the works are on birch-wood and are the size of large books. Transparent layers of antique pigments from Northern Italy, once used to repair church frescoes, are painted over the printed collage images. The powdered pigments from the earth are mixed with egg yolks, providing an organic connection with a specific ecological community.



Lynda Frese’s Pacha Mama: earth realm series imagines a set of religious iconography using ideas borrowed from the Italian Renaissance and comments upon indigenous ideas about the “end time,” a prophecy shared by many cultures about the end of the natural cycle that is upon us. The series draws on these sources to examine the popular meme of the apocalypse and its archetypal images of destruction and rebirth. The work recognizes how Nature teaches us, feeds us, cleans us and mends us throughout time. Combining beliefs about the apocalypse of the feminine earth with equally surreal and enigmatic images of the Virgin Mother Mary, the artist rediscovers the root meaning of the word apocalypse as the “uncovering.” The Saints and the Nature Spirits join forces with the South American earth goddess Pachamama. She appears as a divine entity, warming us, warning us, offering redemption, and proffering enchantment.

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The book Pacha Mama: earth realm will be published this summer with the support of an ATLAS (Awards to Louisiana Artists and Scholars) grant and will include 30 artworks, Sanskrit prayers, essays about nature from noted healers Kathi von Koerber and Michele Baker, and poetry written for this project by Darrell Bourque, Louisiana’s poet laureate.