I“Rays of light” brings to mind the rays of a symbolic sun but the thorns of a plant at the same time. As is her wont, Penelope links the heavens and the earth and, in her Star Gates, also harks back to the symbology that unites us all, that encyclopaedia of symbols that resides in the collective unconscious and from there influences human affairs.

Like a river coursing beneath what people do, the archetypes feed and water, to continue the metaphor, the trees of knowledge and of architecture, art and psychology. Since epochs long forgotten, the sun has been recognised as the source of life and, since epochs even earlier than that it has been depicted just like this: with rays reaching humanity from a cosmic centre. In an esoteric but, at the same time, scientific, symbology it is the reason that illuminates minds, in religion it is God made flesh down here among us.

The images show a dexterity and a speed of execution that is very clearly and directly expressed in its simplicity and able to open a gateway that is much more complex on a sensory level. This Star Gate opens up  a bridge with that river which like this ceases to be underground and is instead oriented  to the heavens for the purpose of illuminating our action like a very long tunnel that connects us with the cosmos nearest Earth, with our source of life and own our very personal star. 

A recent, first-time mother, Penelope approached the birth from the other side of her skin, an experience that in its disruption could only explode into many works that recount its various aspects.

The birth of a new life passes through a portal, a test of maturity that is the delivery, the act that brushes death to lead then to the birth. The immense pain felt during endless hours lead to drinking with full hands from a source that erupts powerfully through a body fighting for life with all its energy. An energy that proves to be much more disruptive than you can ever imagine. The tunnel of death plays with the tunnel of life.

Light duels with darkness, scratches its walls, in a whirlwind of breaths, tears and an overwhelming experience that can be told in a thousand works, but happens in a single, real and explosive way.