Portrait(s) Divine Mother 2024

“Portrait(s), Divine Mother” is a series of self-portraits that pays homage to my matriarchal lineage, Caribbean Shaktism, and the familial narrative intertwining them. Created before and after my mother passed in 2024, I aim to honor the spiritual heritage of my family while unraveling the personal significance of my family history.

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I began exploring this project in January 2024, at my studio in Baltimore, at School 33. It started by tracing my ancestry through my last and middle names and led me to discover things about my mother’s childhood and homeland that, to me, impacted the way I was raised.

My household was a female-dominated one, and my last and middle names reflected that as well. My grandmother’s name, Latchmen Verpen, informed my middle name, Latchmi. These names are derivatives of Lakshmi, the goddess of fortune, wealth, prosperity, beauty, fertility, sovereignty, and abundance. In Guyana, where my maternal family is from, alternative spellings of deities are common.

My mother, Rita, received her last name, Marimutu, from my grandfather’s first name, Marimutu Verpen, which was shifted to my mother’s last name upon her birth. The reasons behind this still elude me.

The name Marimut[h]u is a compound name of Tamil origin, primarily prevalent in South India, particularly in Tamil Nadu. It is formed by combining the words “Mari,” referring to the ancient Hindu goddess of rain and fertility, Mariamman, and “Muthu,” which translates to “pearl” in Tamil, symbolically representing purity, preciousness, and divine grace. Etymologically, the name reflects a deep cultural devotion, acting as a theophoric identifier that invokes the protection and blessings of the deity. [https://www.wisdomlib.org/names/marimuthu]

From here, I connected the dots with the names and childhood stories of my mother. One particular story from my mother’s childhood involved healing a limp arm through a gold arm offered at a temple in Guyana. This temple was a temple of Mariamman in Berbice, Guyana. With confirmation from my mother, although difficult because she was unable to speak following a stroke in 2006, I discovered a rich religion that was deeply connected to me in ways I did not understand. We did not speak much about the rituals she engaged in, as she said they would scare me. But it was one of the last things I was able to learn about her, and myself, before her passing in June.

With the commitment of presenting this series at BlackRock Center for the Arts, I continued to work, although it was hard. It felt profound in some ways, and sad in many others. I missed my mother, and wished I had connected more with my grandmother before she passed a couple of years earlier. So much of my history was missing on both sides, and since my father passed just the year before, I struggled with all of the projects I was working on. I found that I did not want to take any self-portraits, and I didn’t want to get in front of the camera. It seemed vain in some ways.

I chose instead to use processes that I have played with before, but with a new tool, Generative AI. In 2022, I made a series of work that involved a process of photographing, collaging, scanning, and reprinting. “Portrait(s), Contact” was a year-long self-portrait project and relied on the use of “low” methods and “high” production. By using just a toner-based printer and high-resolution scanner, I was able to create hundreds of non-archival compositions that some would consider worthless. The final “photographs” used digital printing methods for fine art production, allowing me to turn these loose collages into archival photographic pieces that could last 100+ years. I loved the series, and I loved how freely it allowed me to work. The process allowed for aspects of control and surprise, which kept the project engaging. I wanted to find ways to do it again, but I have weird rules about beginnings and endings that I wanted to keep.

In 2024, I was experimenting with Generative AI in Photoshop for a course I was teaching on Photoshop at Parsons. I decided to see how it could work for this project, and it surprisingly allowed me to open up the work in a new way.

What I generated for the self-portraits I had created earlier were hands. When Generative AI was asked to make hands, at least at that point in its “artistic career,” it created hands that felt uncomfortably wrong. They often had too many or too few fingers. The joints moved and layered over each other in ways that no real hands should. And maybe in my grief or some AI psychosis, I felt that what it rendered over my self-portraits resonated with some spiritual and ancestral energy. Hands are what hold you from when you are born, and if you are lucky, are there for you when you die. I was there to hold my mother when she passed. I tried to use my hands to revive her, to no avail. The addition of these uncanny hands felt aligned with my unsettled grief, and I found that they portrayed these ubiquitous hands as an eternal, forceful, and loving gesture that aligned with the intentions of my research and the art.

I could have used my own hands and Photoshopped them into a composition, but it felt that doing so would be too direct and intentional. My feelings and thoughts at the time were too scattered and foggy, and there was something that I liked about how AI tried to go about my prompts and the randomness it generated. After finalizing the compositions, I printed them with a color printer that I changed the ink in. In the compartment that contained black ink, I had installed yellow. Thus, I created photographs with no true black, while also alluding to spiritual practices and colors. I rephotographed, or scanned, them and prepared the images for print.

Finally, when getting closer to the exhibition, Joshua Gamma and I talked about printing the work on metal. With help from the Pierians Foundation, I was able to complete it. I delivered it straight to BlackRock Gallery and took the train down to meet the work during installation. When we opened the pieces, with help from the volunteers I knew, I knew that it was the right direction for the work. They were large enough to see the print and scan lines and wrinkles in the page. They were more vibrant than a print on paper, and the shine added to the spiritual aspects I wanted to achieve in the work.

My feelings about working with Generative AI are complicated, more complicated now than when I made this work in 2024. It assisted me in making this work when I was struggling to understand how to present myself, let alone my photographs. I do believe that, when viewing the final works, they are transformed sufficiently to avoid the work infringing on the stolen work of other artists, even though that was not a thought in my mind during the early days of working with it. I have made works for years by printing, collaging, scanning, and reprinting works, and I don’t believe that, at the time, I was truly aware of the environmental implications and the ways in which these models relied on the work of other artists. I am still trying to figure out where I land with it, but as my mother was an avid sci-fi reader before her stroke, I feel like she at least would understand my curiosity.

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I am so proud of the work and the questions it has asked of me. It has helped me work through a difficult part of my life where I lost myself and did not know how to continue with my practice. My mother was a pillar of my conceptual understanding of myself, and she still is. And I am glad that, before I could no longer ask her questions in my life, I could still understand a part of her that eluded me. That came before me, and still stands, embedded in my name.

Links:
Rebecca Marimutu: Portrait(s), Divine Mother, Black Rock Center for the Arts, Germantown, MD 2025

Rebecca Latchmi Marimutu

Portrait(s)

REBECCA MARIMUTU

Portrait(s)

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Portrait(s) Memory Object 2026

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Portrait(s) Divine Mother 2024

Portrait(s) Coated (2023)

Portraits, Contact (2022)

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Portrait(s), Adhered (2021)

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