Page 52 - Nada temas, dice ella

deconstructing and reconstructing the historicisation of the category of ‘woman’ we realise that the recogni- tion of the transformation into wom- an isn’t just an individual process but a collective political exercise.
In her multiple personifications, woman is an empty space, the void that gives rise to creation, a space open to all potentialities as all human beings are born from the body of a woman. Lao-Tzu speaks of woman as
a window. Losing our fear of female autonomy and power and transform- ing them into recognition and co- operation is still an unaccomplished psychopolitical task that often has to be tackled in our own rooms. As Teresa said in the epilogue to The Interior Castle, thus supplanting the principle of authority, ‘I think it will be a conso- lation for you to delight in this interior castle since without permission from the prioress you can enter and take a walk through it at any time.’10
The limestone, the wood and the material poverty of her convents were essential to create an environment favourable to quiet praying and to wandering through the castle of the soul. As well as relying on these fic- tions, as she herself called them, in the ninth chapter of The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila by Herself she described herself as ‘a friend of images’, for she recog- nised her sufferings in an image of a bleeding Christ and this vision marked the beginning of her conversion, her
path towards ethical and aesthetic renewal. She also formed a part
of the anti-Lutheran tendency of the Counter-Reformation.
The exhibition Fear Nothing, She Says isn’t intended as a narrative or
a descriptive essay on the life of Saint Teresa of Avila but rather as an affirm- ation of her condition as a woman and a female writer. The selected works reveal her boldness, her self-assurance and her resolve to understand that the most important mission of each human being is to discover the purpose of their lives, which is the strength that inspires artists to shape their visions over and again, to venture, to destroy and to begin again. Deliberate and continued cultivation of their gifts prompts artists to try and attain the rapture of true creation. Similarly,
by inviting him to take part in the reno- vation of the Carmelite order, Teresa offered John of the Cross a radical path towards ‘risk and change, perfec- tion and utopia,’11 and contributed to the emergence of the greatest verses in universal mysticism from ‘resounding loneliness’. The artists and the works in this exhibition express in a variety of ways their need to explore the mystery of existence, as declared by its sub- title: ‘When art reveals mystic truths.’ Mysticism is a difficult path of approxi- mation to reality understood as that which is most profound, most true, the mystery of the communion between the self and the whole.
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