Lilith Immaculate I

"I am She - Lilith

Mistress of the dark, Of Sheba.

First offender

And succour to demons

Whose sweet seductions and wicked rites

Lead all those too enslaved by the flesh

To trespass against God's holy law.

And tonight I come for you.

 

I am darkness, I am sin

The Queen of lust invited in

Reborn at last to cast my

Fecund shadow on this world,

You shall worship me, enslaved

For many lovers shall I crave

And in return, I'll gladly pave

Your psycho path with pearls

 

Fall for the love of me

Crawl for the love of me

Drool for the love of my virulent sway

I grow more master the faster the days"

 

(I am) Lilith Immaculate"

 

Dani Filth - Cult Of Venus Adversa/Lilith Immaculate

 

 

I know I should more but, I normally do not write explanations for many of the pieces I present. So this will be a little bit unusual for me to share. So here is a little background, information and some of my thought process for interpretation of the piece.

 

I have a great aversion to using stock images of others for a wide variety of reasons. I don't care if other employ them but it is not for me. Thus, every image used in construction was shot by myself with the exception of the horns and stitches (from shutterfly.com).

 

For the piece I took a combination of the lyrics above for inspiration.

For those who do not know, in Abrahamic traditions, Lilith was the first wife of Adam and was not made from his flesh. Many myths about her tell of a woman who was strong willed and sexually liberated; akin to a more modern view of feminism. For these reasons, God caste her out of the garden in to the barren world. Because of her crimes she is considered to be the first offender of God and from her evil was born into the world through her blood line.

 

There is a tradition in religious art that dates back at least to the middle ages through the Renaissance in western European culture to personify her in paintings as half snake/half woman. In some suppressed christian teachings it is said that after she was caste from Eden, Lilith returned to the Garden in the form of a snake to tempt Eve to eat from the Tree as her revenge against God for her banishment.

 

Over the recent months I have been steadily working on building stronger characters as well as liminal places in which the characters can dwell. For this piece, I really wanted to push myself as far as I felt my skills could take me; and maybe further.

 

This is varient1.

 

I constructed the background from about five images to give the appearance of a royal tomb of sorts. The background columns are from a mourning chapel dedicated to St. Mary (the immaculate and virtuous.) The mausoleum doors are from a crypt of a family who had a spouse kill another over an affair.

 

The center piece is constructed from about 12 images. he feminine form was an image I shot of a tribute headstone of an angel for a group of nuns of a local convent.

 

Here I broke from symbolic tradition. Instead of serpentine qualities, I chose to alter the metaphor to ram horns because the Ram has more of a masculine association with it as well as also being link to virility and war. Thus, making the image bolder and linking slender feminine figure to masculine qualities visual. Plus I like the contradiction of a feminine form and masculine symbols without loosing feminine quality. (I employ visual contradiction quite often in my pieces so I can create a disquiet image.)

 

The atmosphere is actually made of three images of wispy cloud images and I constructed the light burn texture by hand.

 

All together, the piece took about 10-15 hours to construct and perfect.

Done