Odalisques

Just about every person I have spoken to who is familiar with the term "odalisque" thinks the same thing I do when asked what odalisque means. We think of familiar famous paintings with the title Odalisque, paintings by Ingres, Delacroix, Monet, and Renoir. We associate beautiful, voluptuous, mostly naked, reclining women with the term.

I began thinking about the term odalisque as I found myself using images of naked women in my glass work to express feelings and experiences. Imagine my surprise to discover that odalisques were Turkish slaves, chambermaids. If an odalisque was fortunate enough to be noticed by her master and bedded, even if just once, she advanced to the rank of concubine. If she bore a child from their union, then she became one of his wives. I imagine that the appeal of painting these women was the fantasy that it engendered for the male viewer - just to think of having a houseful of women who could serve as a sexual partner if and when he wanted....

If the odalisque is a slave then what purpose does the odalisque serve in my work? In the past year I have thought a lot about how we can easily become trapped in our minds, trapped by fantasies, by wishes, by imagined and real injustice, by lust, by anger, by depression and despair, by grief. We take on and embrace this enslavement to the emotions inside of ourselves when we can't see our way to solving the problem. For many, it is more comfortable to live inside this servitude than it is to battle and break our way out. So perhaps the odalisque is an appropriate symbol of the enslavements we enter into when we allow feeling and fantasies to consume us.