Close-up of the capsule from “The Emanation of Barbelo”The Relics
These pieces were not planned so much as received. Each one arrived with its own requirements, its materials, its scale, its name. They are devotional objects in the oldest sense, made to hold what is too large for ordinary life, too sacred for casual display.
I think of myself as a wrist. Something arrives first, an image, a feeling, a wound that won’t leave, and my job is to find a way to bring it into the physical world.
The figures that emerge are rooted in Gnostic and classical mythology, goddesses and archetypes from traditions that honored the feminine divine long before it was written out of the story. My own spiritual practice is Buddhist and Taoist, which means I come to these figures not as a devotee but as a witness, present, receptive, trying to get out of the way.
Every piece begins with something felt before anything is planned. Sometimes that feeling is inspiration. Sometimes it is grief. Sometimes it is plain indignation. From there, it becomes work. Figuring out materials, scale, and process. Sometimes the making is joyful. Sometimes it is frustrating. Sometimes what wants to come through is larger than what feels manageable. I am just the one who shows up and tries to get it right.
These figures are not arriving by accident. The goddesses and archetypes in this series are not historical curiosities or purely personal obsessions. They feel the urgency of this moment, a time when old stories are being reexamined, when what was written out of history is finding its way back. I don’t think it matters whether you arrive here through art, through spirituality, through history, or simply through curiosity.
These pieces don’t require a particular belief system. They only ask to be felt.
The Wound of the Magdeline
60 x 25 inches
Carved plaster, gold leaf, polymer, poured and draped resin, oil paint, oil pastel, cast acorn, and botanicals.
She was there at the cross. She was the first at the tomb. She was the one he trusted with what the others weren’t ready to hear. And then, systematically, over centuries, that was rewritten. The apostle became the fallen woman. The keeper of the deepest teaching became a cautionary tale about sin and redemption. The Gnostic texts that told the truer story were buried in the Egyptian desert for two thousand years. That is the wound. Not the spear. The erasure. The form at the center of this piece is the vesica piscis, the sacred geometry of the opening, the place where two worlds meet. I made it before I knew its name or its history. That is how this work moves. Inside the sealed capsule, a miniature landscape painted in the colors of early spring, a sculpted butterfly just past the moment of becoming, an oak acorn and branch from the ranch. New life held inside the wound itself. She is returning now. Not as a symbol. As a correction. This piece is part of that.
This work is available for acquisition.
To inquire or to learn about the non-profit foundation stewardship, contact: yaykim@gmail.com
The Emanation of Barbelo
60 x 25 inches
Carved plaster, gold leaf, polymer, poured and draped resin, oil paint, oil pastel, creek minerals, sand and orchids
Before Sophia fell. Before Magdalene was erased. Before any of it, there was Barbelo. / In Gnostic cosmology, she is the first emanation, the initial thought of the Infinite made manifest. Not created, exactly. More like the moment the divine became aware of itself. She is described in the Nag Hammadi texts as the first power, the perfect glory. She is Mother-Father, androgynous, prior to division. Everything that follows, every aeon, every descent, every return, traces back to her. / This is the most hopeful piece in the series. It is also the most explosive. That is not a coincidence. The beginning of everything is not quiet. It is an event horizon, a moment of pure generative force. We are living inside one of those moments right now. Old structures are giving way. What was suppressed is surfacing. What was forgotten is being remembered. Barbelo arrived at exactly the right time. / The gold leaf here is not an ornament. It is the energy of that first moment, still moving.
This work is available for acquisition.
To inquire or to learn about the non-profit foundation stewardship, contact: yaykim@gmail.com
The Resurrection of Sofia
66 x 36 inches
Carved plaster, gold leaf, polymer, poured and draped resin, oil paint, oil pastel, satin fabric, wasp nest paper
In Gnostic cosmology, Sophia is divine wisdom herself. She is the youngest of the aeons, the emanations of the infinite, and she fell. Driven by a passionate desire to know the unknowable directly, she acted alone, without her consort, without balance. What emerged from that act was the material world as we know it. The flawed creation. The prison of forgetting.
She has been there ever since. Asleep inside it. The Pistis Sophia, one of the Nag Hammadi texts, is essentially her long cry from within the darkness, her plea to be remembered, to be restored.
This piece is not about the fall. It is about the moment after. The capsule is bursting open. She is coming back. The wasp nest paper that forms the ground of this piece is one of nature’s most precise builders, a material made from nothing but chewed wood and intention. It became the world she is rising out of. This was the most difficult piece in the series to make, technically and emotionally. New materials, new problems, new solutions. The piece demanded it.
She is returning now, as she always does when wisdom is most needed. We are living in that moment.
This work is available for acquisition.
To inquire or to learn about foundation stewardship, contact: yaykim@gmail.com
Tiamat Rising
36 x 48 inches
Burned bark, carved plaster, gold leaf, selenite crystals, acrylic, resin, sculpted clay, oil paint
In progress
Tiamat is the oldest mother. In Babylonian mythology, she is the primordial salt ocean, the chaos before form, the body from which the world was made. When Marduk slays her and splits her open, the official story calls it victory. This piece calls it something else.
Her body divides at the center, two great forms pulling apart from a common root. From that crack, creatures emerge, magical and not yet whole. From that same wound rise selenite crystals and explosions of gold leaf. And above it all, suspended at her crown, a transparent capsule holding water and a golden mirror. Her future. What she becomes on the other side of what was done to her. / She is not defeated here. She is in the process of becoming something the myth never imagined.