French-American artist Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) was a prolific feminist artist known for her work that explores gender and femininity and draws from her own childhood memories. While most are familiar with the artist’s large-scale sculptures, she also created a number of paintings and prints, in which the figure of St. Sebastian is a repeated subject. In this print, Sainte Sebastienne (1992) the martyred saint is transformed into a headless, voluptuous woman. While the original Biblical figure was shot many times with arrows while tied to a tree, Bourgeois depicts the figure in an exaggerated step, arrows instead being used to point to various curves of her body. The work is sometimes titled The Arrows of Stress, suggesting that these gesturing arrows represent the many external words and hostilities that harm the female body.

Learn more about the work that inspired this pin HERE.