Thinking Out LoudBorn for you is a portrait of the holy family: Mary, Joseph, and baby Jesus. Julie Dowling is a Badimaya First Nations artist, and her portrait swaps iconic figures for her own people – these are her friends and family.
Baby Jesus is based on a child that was separated from Dowling’s family in a child custody battle and disconnected from his Aboriginal heritage.
These extra evocations of the dispossession of First Nations people bring new dimensions to the nativity scene and point to how people have resonated with the experience of the holy family through history. It is a wonder-filled thing, that God would choose for his baby to be born into this world, with all its precarity, violence, and risky journeys through the night.
Dowling says that she was inspired by Caravaggio’s Rest on the Flight to Egypt (1601), where Jesus dozes in Mary’s arms to angelic music. But the situation is fraught. Mary and Joseph are fleeing King Herod’s murderous threats to kill a rival baby king – Jesus. Like Caravaggio’s painting, Dowling also evokes a family’s resilience as it faces existential danger.
Dowling’s Mary is a political activist from South Australia. The original, biblical Mary looks forward to the birth of her son as a sign of God’s divine activism: God is the mighty one “who has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly” (Luke 1:52).
Born for You is carefully filled with both Indigenous and Christian Orthodox imagery. The crosses and the hands that point outward in Jesus’ halo remind the viewer that Jesus’ arrival within a specific family, at a specific place and time, is important for all families. Jesus’ tender suspension at the centre of this painting reminds that it is God who lifts up the lowly, those without power.
Image source: Born for you by Julie Dowling, from Our Mob, God’s Story (Bible Society, 2017)
For more of Julie Downing’s work, visit Niagara Galleries.