I have known the artist Tsering for a number of years. We met in the Archibald when I was 22 and I've always felt an ease of communication with her. When she visited me at The Brett Whitley studio during my intervention it felt natural to ask her if she'd like to collaborate with me on a work for Hysteria. She said yes and we found a mutual interest in the story of Mary Magdalene.

An appealing subject for many artists including Titian, the latter whose work Tsering had already referenced in a self-portrait she created in 2017. We were both interested not only in the sexualising of Mary, which was officially established by Pope Gregory 'The Great' in 591 but also in why that then made her only acceptable if penitent? This anti-sexual sexualising of Mary.

Rather than pretend that Tsering hadn't already explored this theme I suggested we respond to her work and mirror the composition as Titian himself mirrored the pose of his 'Penitent Magdalene' (1531) in his work 'Venus with a mirror' (1555). When I pointed this out we began to deconstruct the implications of this there on the museum wall at the Brett Whiteley Studio. We found the pose, again and again, being used to represent the false modesty of Venus, from Bottichelli's 'Birth of Venus' (1486) to a first-century marble copy of a statue from Athens titled 'The Venus de Medici'. Conversely, we found the same pose bathed in shame in earlier depictions of nude mortal women from the bible i.e. Masaccio's 'The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden' (1425). The upward-turned gaze of the mortal woman towards a greater power seemed to be one of the main methods through which these artists created this psychological difference. I suggested we expand the mirror in Titian's Venus to reveal a reimagined version of his penitent Magdalene, making use of the fact that the artist himself either knowingly or unknowingly mirrored the two in his own work. Setting aside, for now, the fact that scholars don't believe Mary was actually a prostitute, this compositional device allows us to begin to explore the question of why the goddess of love, beauty, sex, fertility and victory can be suggestively innocent and yet her traits in a mortal woman are made to be base. Is the impurity due to the latter being mortal, or is it the implication that she would gain financial independence through it? In doing so we are building on Tsering’s original self-portrait to ask a different set of questions.