SAMA member, Lilian Broca has completed two monumental mosaic series on the biblical figures of Esther and Judith and there is another on the way—Mary Magdalene.
An article on her mosaic work has just been published in the prestigious international academic magazine called Journal of Mosaic Research, out of Izmir, Turkey.
To read it, go to https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/pub/jmr (click on English version upper right) scroll down to article 18 From Virtue to Power: Explorations in Female Heroism- The Mosaics of Lilian Broca. Clicking there will link you to a page where you can download the pdf on the upper left hand side or you may access it here: Broca Article
The following excerpt is from Angela Clarke’s From Virtue to Power: Explorations in Female Heroism –The Mosaics of Lilian Broca
“Lilian Broca uses the medium of mosaic as a monumental genre of art that documents stories of ancient heroes. She inserts the stories of three women recounted in Biblical texts to demonstrate that women, traditionally valued for virtue, beauty and devoted service to husbands and fathers, actually held powerful roles. These women and their stories must be celebrated for their transgression of the power boundaries upheld for their gender. Broca utilizes the monumental mosaic medium in a postmodern way to supersede the boundaries of linear time and rigid social norms. Time and age, reveals Broca, have always been applied to women in a pejorative way. Hence Broca offers her versions of how ancient stories could be represented if their focus were on prowess and intellectual acumen, rather than solely virtue. Broca hopes that we will see female authority not as a new development but one that, in the words of Ecclesiastes 3:15, has ‘already been, and [that] what will be has been before.’”
Angela Clarke, Ph.D.
Italian Cultural Centre Museum, 3075 Slocan Street, Vancouver, BCV5M 3E4, Canada. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4876-5374.
“Queen Esther Revealing her True Identity”, 2006,
H48” x W33” Iridium, smalti, gems, gold tessera, gold leaf
“Judith Seducing Holofernes”, 2014, (Diptych), H73” x W96” Byzantine smalti, millefiori, gold smalti, ceramic tile border on honeycomb panel
“Mary Magdalene The Sacred Union”, 2019,
H79” x W48”, Byzantine smalti, gold tesserae on honeycomb panel