The Collection

The women in this collection are known to us through a single document: a poem written to mark the day they entered religious life, poems archived at Park Abbey.

Each portrait is generated by a custom language model, created in partnership with TITLES, trained on two bodies of material in deliberate tension: the Abbey's poetic records, and a counter-tradition of writing by and about women—from Hadewijch of Antwerp to Mary Wollstonecraft—that insisted they were more than the record allowed.

The resulting images take Flemish portraiture as their visual grammar—dark grounds, raking light, formal pose, and contained expression–only to depart from it.

Through small adjustments in gaze, expression, posture, and object, each portrait proposes a face the archive withheld.

The date given for each work is the date of the admission poem that occasioned it. The place, where specified, is where the woman entered religious life. Where an alternate name appears, it’s the name she took upon entering her order—a practice not universal but recorded for some women in this collection.

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