Swan Maiden art print

A4 fine art print in 300gsm heavy art paper 

A man comes upon a woman in a pool. He steals the feathered robe that she has cast off to bathe so she will not fly away.  He marries her and she bears him children and is a dutiful wife. One day she finds the robe he has hidden away, and reconnects with her true birdlike form.  She flies away. 

Throughout time and across almost every culture, a version of the swan maiden myth exists. For all of time this tale, of a woman separated from her true nature, having her means to her freedom stolen has been handed down generation to generation.  The stories that endure through time are never by accident, they have lessons and meaning that each generation would do well to heed.  

We can listen to the swan maiden and know that for thousands and thousands of years women have been contending with the tension between their ‘self’ and the roles that their cultures cast them in. We can take a surface reading and talk about how marriage was a theft of agency, the sacrifice of self to family life, or even of the dangers of bathing in moonlit glades. 

What relevance does this swan maiden bring to us now?  We have a choice (here in the UK) we can choose not to marry, not to have children, w ecan throw off the patriarchal expectations of our gender. 

And yet, as I absorbed myself in thinking about this story,  I think the swan maiden shows us all a moment that we will come to; Not in the flying-away-from-a-life-we-didn’t-choose way (unless it is!) but in a facing-who-we-really-are-all-along way.  This moment may come in a beautiful revelation, or after a terrible trauma, or more ordinarily,  a that subtle sense that there are parts of ourselves we have left behind that we never meant to. 

I share with you a drawing of woman in transition.  She’s found her feathered cloak, she is becoming more of herself than she ever was.  What she does next is up to her.