Description

Limited Editon Nomsa Signed Poster by Woodrow Nash 1 of 100. “Mother” She does not carry her children. She carries the vessel that will carry her children’s children. Nomsa is the long arithmetic of motherhood, the woman who knows that what she gives will not finish its journey in her lifetime, and gives it anyway.

Upon her head she balances a ceremonial bowl, terracotta-orange and indigo-shadowed, painted with the running figures of antelope,  the swift, the alert, the ones who survive by paying attention. The bowl is empty. Or it is full of everything she has not yet poured out.

Her face is divided into two countries. The right side, the side she lets you see , is painted in the soft gold of harvest, the warm clay of patience. The left side, her interior, is cobalt blue, the color of the deep grief she does not speak about but does not deny. Her lips are blue. Her sorrow has been kissed and given a place to live.

Her ear holds a heavy bronze disc the size of her palm, weighted, ancient, the kind of earring that announces itself before the woman wearing it speaks. At her throat, four heavy ropes of chalk-stone beads rise in terraced layers, each one a generation she has named, each one a name she refuses to let fall out of use. Across her chest, pale handprints reach up toward her face, the touch of every child she has held, every elder she has bathed, every body she has prepared for what comes after the body.

Behind her, the ghosted profile of an ancestor watches, holding the same posture, wearing the same paint. They are the same woman. They have always been the same woman.

The same well that holds your laughter was carved by your tears. The deeper sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.

Nomsa belongs in the kitchen of a woman who feeds people. She belongs in the room of a mother who has buried a child and still finds reason to plant something. She belongs in the home of anyone who has learned that the well does not fill itself. Nomsa is full.