Eve’s Roots tells my story about Eve, after Lilith the second woman in the earthly paradise. But did she really come from Adam’s rib? If not, where did she come from then? Where are her roots?
Eve’s Roots, carved from the white sapwood of American walnut: still soft, but very fine in structure.
The most beautiful reliefs I find are not those sculptures with detailed figures, where no imagination is needed anymore. I quickly walk past them bored. Unless they are very skillfully carved, like the miniature prayer nuts from the workshop of Adam Dirksz.
How much more beautiful it is when shadows suggest the story by playing a subtle game with light. A game that makes the relief change again and again. Shadows that make the soft lines deep and sharp when the sun shines. Or flatten them when the sky in the Netherlands turns grey. Let the viewer themselves imagine and discover what they see in the sculpture.
Necklace is ‘not OK’
I took a wooden necklace by the American Julia Harrison as a starting point.
She uses it, I believe, as teaching material for her students. Just as Jan van Harskamp in turn sets all newcomers in his workshop to carving a little flower. Anyone who has ever had wood carving lessons from him knows exactly what is meant by ‘Jan’s little flower’.
A beautiful necklace by the American Julia Harrison.
Everyone will have their own associations with this seemingly simple piece of jewelry by Harrison. Actually it is an extremely flat torso of a female lower body. Technically very nicely executed. I admiringly showed a photocopy of it to a Woke girl. Her reaction, without thinking for a second: ‘I would never wear that’. Not OK, then. After that I never saw her at the wood carving lesson again.
I was mainly interested in how you can bring out an image with rasps and sanding. How a simple ‘Y-shape’ becomes a body. After cutting out the basic shape with a V-shaped gouge, a burin, sanding with increasingly finer sandpaper takes many hours. Plenty of time to fantasize about who this woman could be, who slowly emerged under my hands.
Shame did not exist yet
Why not the first woman in the world, for those who want to believe the Bible? According to Jewish tradition it must have been Lilith, but I’ll stick with Eve for now. How did she and Adam walk around there in the Garden of Eden? Naked? Shame did not exist yet, before the Fall. And it must have been warm there, in their paradise, somewhere between the Euphrates and the Tigris.
Prudish painters and sculptors from the 16th century nevertheless gave the couple a fig leaf to cover their genitals. Clever how that leaf stayed on, without elastic bands or strings.
Even more puzzling is the origin of Eve. Born from Adam’s rib? Beautifully devised story, but scientifically not tenable for long – although, in the future a lot seems possible with DNA technology. In my imagination she must have been born somewhere outside Paradise. She must have walked in there, lured by the abundance of flowers, animals, birds, trees and fruit. Walls and fences with barbed wire did not exist yet in the Middle East.
To the fantasy of the Book of Genesis I add my own. Eve, I believe, was born on a piece of land that may not have been as abundant as Paradise, but still. As a child she had of course already eaten plenty of apples there. She knew after all that this fruit was not poisonous. She really didn’t need the serpent’s encouragement to sink her teeth into a tasty apple again.
The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil
That God in Paradise maintained such special legislation, such as declaring that apple a forbidden fruit, was therefore hard for Eve to accept. The tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil? Why then? Fine apples, aren’t they? Healthy too! All Christians today think so too, by the way, including those who still believe that the serpent could really talk and is a treacherous reptile. But no one started eradicating the apple tree after the Fall.
To the relief of Eve I have therefore added the root system of a tree. In gold leaf. On her belly, like a kind of tattoo. It could be the roots of an apple tree. Or it could symbolically be the question of what Eve’s real ‘roots’ are.
Jan Bom, May 8, 2025
