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Punica Granatum is the Latin botanical name for pomegranate, and it is not surprising to see an embossed rendition of a 19th century botanical engraving. Above the image we see the words “He Secretly Put In My Mouth Sweet Food || A Pomegranate Seed” with the same phrase repeated below in Greek. These words are taken from the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, and recall one of the key scenes in the Persephone story: Persephone eating the pomegranate seeds. Then, after all the whiteness, after an almost minimalist reserve, Bart abruptly revisits the symbolism of the succulent red pomegranate: to an attached ribbon bookmark, she has

affixed two gleaming crimson glass beads, vivid surrogates for the mythic fruit.

This piece, Demeter and Persephone, is my own work, and consists of five wooden statuettes. Each figure represents a phase of the two goddesses as described in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter. Demeter is depicted first as the Goddess, and then disguised as the old woman, Doso. Persephone is shown as a young girl, as the Queen of Hades and as the adult woman who is returned to her mother.


Demeter and Persephone
Lauren Dudley

Nettles’ work suggests the rich symbolic language of the two fruits. According to Judeo-Christian tradition, Adam and Eve, with Eve as the temptress, ate the fruit from the forbidden Tree of Knowledge and were expelled from Paradise, casting humanity into a mortal world of sin and suffering. The apple thus represents temptation and sin, but knowledge as well, something that humans after The Fall would have to struggle to obtain. The pomegranate, a crucial symbol in the myth of Persephone, also has both negative and positive connotations. Because Persephone is both the Queen of the Underworld and the Goddess of Spring or Vegetation, the pomegranate is paradoxically both “the fruit of death” and a symbol of fertility and abundance.

The pomegranate, with its brilliant jewel-like seeds and flamboyant color, has been revered and invested with symbolism and mystery since ancient times. In her book Punica Granatum, Harriet Bart calmly embraces this myth-saturated fruit and, in a brilliant counterintuitive move, strips away all of its fabled floridity by presenting it in delicate, all-white embossments. Here the pomegranates rest serenely on the page, joined by similarly reserved images of the Goddess Aphrodite. Their power resides in their quiet self-containment. The text is excerpted from both classical and contemporary writers, among the latter, André Gide, Pablo Neruda and Rainer Maria Rilke, among others. By commingling these writings, Bart creates a new text that, like the images, sits gently on the page, seemingly nudging the eye along from line to line.

Punica Granatum
Harriet Bart



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