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CANBERRA - The artist behind a controversial work depicting terrorism mastermind Osama bin Laden morphing into Jesus today invited those considering her work to look a little more deeply than the obvious comparison of good and evil.
Queensland artist Priscilla Bracks denied she had deliberately set out to be offensive.
"Absolutely not, no, no. I am not interested in being offensive. I am interested in having a discussion and asking questions about how we think about our world and what we accept and what we don't accept," she told ABC radio.
Ms Bracks' work and a statue of the Virgin Mary wearing an Islamic burqa by Sydney artist Luke Sullivan have been entered into Australia's top religious art competition, the Blake Prize.
Both Prime Minister John Howard and Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd have criticised their inclusion.
"The choice of such artwork is gratuitously offensive to the religious beliefs of many Australians," Mr Howard said in News Ltd newspapers.
Ms Bracks welcomed the criticism.
"Well I suppose we always have an opinion on how they do their job. I am fine with the fact that they might have an opinion on how I do mine," she said.
"If the work is perceived by some people as not having artistic merit, then that is their right to think however they like about the piece.
"But I just ask people to think about it a little bit more deeply because it is a very loaded work which means that there are so many different meanings."
Ms Bracks said one issue behind her work was the glorification of Osama bin Laden in some parts of the world.
"What I was thinking about is, well, what would happen to the stories about this man over thousands of years. Could that possibly lead to someone with a cult-like status," she said.
Ms Bracks said there were so many ways her images could be read.
"Immediately people are seizing on what they see as the most controversial, that I am comparing the two," she said.
"But I could actually be saying it is a juxtaposition of good and evil which I see as the base level reading of that work. But then on a more sophisticated level you could perhaps look how it could be an image which is a cautionary tale, asking the question do we have to be a little bit more careful about what we focus on in the here and now."
- AAP
