The Sirens

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death.

Jess’s paintings serve as a glimpse into her mind, giving Lucy a way to understand Jess’s obsessions while Jess isn’t there to explain them. Her paintings for The Sirens exhibit especially reveal Jess’s preoccupations with the experiences she’s witnessing in her dreams and her connection to the women who inhabit them. In this way, the paintings come to symbolize Jess’s unconscious, as she’s recalling an ancestral memory that was formative for the woman who gave birth to her. The paintings, the product of Jess’s subconscious, demonstrate The Pull of Familial Relationships as Jess can access these genetic memories and feel drawn by them.

The paintings of the convict women in the dark hold also represent Jess’s own feelings about being trapped or feeling different because of her skin. She initially feels a sense of isolation and disconnection from her past because she doesn’t know her biological origins or why her birth mother might have left her in the cave. The painting of the two women on the easel signals Jess’s wish to reconnect with Lucy, to acknowledge and be acknowledged by her daughter. She feels the powerful pull of motherhood and likewise the sense of