Nané, Goddess of War
Watercolour on Paper, 45 x 60 inches, 2025.
Violence and wisdom are not opposites—they are twin forces in the fight for survival. Nané stands at this crossroads, where defense becomes sacred.
This piece is part of an ongoing series in which I reimagine pre-Christian Armenian goddesses through a contemporary lens. These mythic figures—once erased by Armenia’s early adoption of Christianity—are reclaimed here as powerful archetypes of womanhood, resilience, and transformation. You can explore the other goddesses in the series, Anahid, Anoush and the most recent work, Spandaramet.
In this large-scale watercolor—an especially difficult medium to control at such size—I’ve reimagined Nané not as a goddess of conquest, but of resistance. She appears as a woman fedayi, an Armenian resistance fighter during the genocide, standing firm against erasure. Her gaze is unwavering, her figure grounded in earthy pigments and stormy bright armenian rug pattern - an item that every armenian has in their house a symbol of the homeland whereever you are in the world. A haze of ancestral smoke coils behind her forming a infamous photo of the death marches of the 1915 genocide —memory and myth entwined.
