Who Watches the Child: Complete

The first work in my new series is complete!  I had a number of new works, some of which I have featured on my previous blog site, professionally photographed earlier this week.  You'll see in the photos posted here that they are much sharper with detail much more visible than in the photos that I posted previously.

Here's how the  whole work looks.  The new photographs show the patterns and texture of the gold work beautifully.  The colours, however, are not really true.  the silk threads appear almost fluorescent in the photos, when in fact the colour is much less intense and cooler in tone.  The reflectiveness of both the gold and the silk make it very difficult to get accurate colour.

You will notice that the shape of the baby's cradle and the little pink symbols in the gold border are the same.  This is the Adinkara symbol, Akoben.  It represents vigilance and wariness.

You can see the symbol in the gold border here.....

..and again here.

The shadowy figure represents the dangers, real and imagined, to which a young child is vulnerable.  He is the bogey man of nightmares, the lurking stranger and the harmful relative.  He is there and he is not there and so the question begs, who watches the child?