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Location: The Gladstone Hotel Art Bar
An installation of suspended crowns and mixed media works on paper and canvas Jacqueline Treloars Crowns for the Queen of Heaven derives from her fascination with the crowned statues of the Virgin Mary has evolved from her years living in the inner city of Palermo where religious processions and festivities are a part of the fabric of the city. The ongoing project Crowns for the Queen of Heaven displays a set of four small circular crowns each being embellished and decorated to represent a period of life and a season of the year: spring is infancy and childhood, summer is youth, autumn the adult and winter old age. The four ten-inch diameter crowns are covered inside and out with rich fabrics and trims and embellished with a myriad of symbolic and decorative elements relating to the period of life represented. Each has jewel motif circular forms holding portraits of family and friends relevant to the particular life stage. Traditionally, a crown represents legitimacy, triumph, power, glory or immortality. Not only it makes a person optically taller, but also it announces that this person is endowed with superior virtues, skills, and potentially god-like qualities. A crown protects and alienates. It is not by accident, that Treloar has chosen this utmost symbol of institutionalized superiority to be the carrier of the most personal and intimate confession possible. We are not intimidated by priceless wealth of gems, pearls and gold any more. Instead we are exposed to memories of spinning carousels, flea markets, family reunions, birthday celebrations, toys, trinkets, treasure chests and treasured memories. By incorporating images of her own friends and family members, Treloar inverts the crowns untouchable sacredness into a vulnerable personal statement, which communicates universal concepts of human experience. She seeks to channel the strength and passion of the sacred, ecclesiastical ritual into a more intimate personal statement, which nonetheless communicates universal concepts of human experience such as birth and death, aging and dependency, and the strength of family and social relationships. Elaborate beaded and stitched mixed media works on canvas and paper repeat the crown iconography and also use much of the material gathered from a recent research trip to southern Spain in July 2013. They include paintings from images taken in the Santa Maria la Blanca synagogue in Toledo, the Mezquita in Cordova, the Plaza de Toros de la Real Maestranza, the Archeological museum and Real Alcazar gardens in Seville, and the Nasrid palaces and Generalife gardens in Granada Resources The four small crowns are based on the crown of Constance of Aragon- interred wearing the crown which is now displayed in the Treasury in the museum of Palermo Cathedral. The crown was created in Byzantine-Arab style in Palermo by the royal jewelers from gold, pearls and large precious gems with enamelled details. Modified fleurs-de-lis are visible along the rim. (Often identified with French dynasties, the fleur-de-lis was in fact used as a royal motif by all of Sicily\’s Norman rulers from their first arrival in Palermo.) Another visual and stylistic reference is found in the Treasure of Guarrazar, an archeological find composed of twenty-six votive crowns and gold crosses that had originally been offered to the Roman Catholic Church by the Visigoth kings in seventh century Hispania as a gesture of the orthodoxy of their faith and their submission to ecclesiastical hierarchy. This heavy Byzantine influence of theseVisigothic works is seen in the techniques of gem encrustation and the style of the lettering found at Guarrazar and practised throughout the Germanic world. These crowns were never meant to be worn, as they were gifts to the church to be hung above the altar. Historical origin The exhibition title comes from Regina Coeli (Queen of Heaven), an anthem of the Roman Catholic Church which replaces the Angelus at Eastertide (from Holy Saturday until the Saturday after Pentecost) and is named for its opening words in Latin. The title Queen of Heaven was a topos of the Catholic tradition, invoked in prayers and devotional literature, and seen in Western art in the subject of the Coronation of the Virgin, from the High Middle Ages, long before it was formally defined by the Church. The Romanesque period saw a proliferation of crowned images of Christ, who is often depicted in wood and metal figures, as well as in manuscript illuminations, wearing a crown on the cross. Around the same time we see also the introduction of crowned images of the Virgin Mary, as the concept of Mary as Queen of Heaven becomes increasingly prominent. Crowns designed solely for statues became increasingly elaborate, especially in the Baroque period, often framed with a flat radiating \”sunburst.\” Votive crowns have continued to be produced in Catholic countries in modern times. They are typically kept in the church treasury except on special occasions such as relevant feast-days when they are worn by the statue.
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