Miranda Walker: Madonna

The power of women has always be thought of as having been subjugated by the Roman Catholic church - Pope John even apologised to women in 1995. But it may be that the symbols tell us something else. In Miranda Walker's tight-cropped images of the faces of statuettes of the Virgin we start to see woman in her many guises, including expressions of strength, sexuality and sterness. These blue-eyed, red-lipped madonnas, stripped of all the background religiosity, appear more powerful than the dolls that we first take them for.

Miranda Walker has studied documentary photography at Newport College of Art and then MA Documentary Photography at University of Wales College. She has exhibited her work and has had solo exhibitions. Her latest work titled 'Madonna' explores the question whether women have been given short shrift or even scorned and subjugated in the past by the Catholic Church. Depictions of the Virgin Mary tend on first sight to be rather saccharin images or statues in which she is usually holding the Christ child or the dying adult Christ, and appearing self-sacrificing, passive, chaste and young.

In this set of pictures, Walker explores all this and she photographs her stripped of all the usual symbolism or indications of her religious status, so that her gaze is disconnected from these responsibilities and is just that of a woman. Far from being a symbol of downtrodden womanhood, she is rather the symbol of the continuing power of the female in all her aspects. Her influence and appeal is immense and many faceted throughout the Catholic world. It is almost as if the Church, despite attempts to disempower and subjugate the female has had to give in to universal demand and accept a continuing and immeasurably powerful female deity - ruffled, sometimes troubled, sometimes really fed up - but still there, indomitable.