What happens when the women immortalised in old master paintings step out of their gilded frames and into the chaos of modern domestic life? That’s the question artist Sarah Lightman tackles, with wit, irreverence and insight, in her exhibition Biblical Women Ageing Disgracefully, now on at Chester Visual Arts, Grovesnor Shopping Centre.

In works from her Biblical Domestic (2021–2024) and Menstrual Hystery (2024) series, Lightman trades halos for housework, and heavenly glory for the cluttered reality of her own everyday life. Her saints and heroines aren’t meditating in divine serenity – they’re battling menopause, messy kitchens and midlife malaise.

With humour and intimacy, Lightman probes the distance between the idealised women of religious art and the ageing bodies we’re taught to hide. Her characters, drawn from both the canon of western Christian art and the sacred Jewish texts of her upbringing, are lovingly reimagined through a feminist lens.

What if Mary hated soft play as much as the rest of us? What if Eve was just trying to get through another basket of laundry? What if biblical women aged in real time?

With bold colours, absurdist touches and deep empathy, Biblical Women Ageing Disgracefully reframes these archetypes for today – and starts fresh conversations about visibility, care and womanhood.

Old masters, new messes

In Fridge Frustrations (2022), Caravaggio’s Judith Beheading Holofernes (1599) becomes a scene of domestic dread. Judith still holds Holofernes’ severed head – but now her crisis is storage, not salvation:

Judith can’t find anywhere in the fridge for her organic and fresh cut of Holofernes.

Lightman retains the dramatic composition of the original but shifts its meaning entirely. Her watercolour medium softens the baroque oil intensity, introducing levity without losing emotional depth.

In The Annunciation of the Menopause (2024), she riffs on The Annunciation by Fra Angelico (1425-26), the early Renaissance fresco where the Virgin Mary receives the angel Gabriel’s news that she’ll bear the son of God.

Here, Mary’s serene acceptance is swapped for something far more visceral: she sits beside an exam table mid heavy bleed, not in graceful surrender but bodily discomfort. Gabriel is gone, replaced by a gynaecologist in latex gloves. The walls? Tiled not with gold leaf but with packets of Always. This is no divine encounter – just hot flushes, greasy hair and hormonal chaos. No spiritual serenity in sight.

Instead of youthful grace, Lightman gives us perimenopausal truth: gritty, awkward, real.

Not a rejection, but a rewriting

Lightman’s work is unabashedly feminist and unapologetically funny – but it’s also rooted in reverence. Her reinterpretations of women from Hebrew scripture honour the complexity of these figures and draw from the feminist Jewish tradition of midrash: creative interpretation that fills in the biblical silences.

Lightman isn’t discarding these sacred stories: she’s inhabiting them. She paints the parts we were never told, the thoughts and struggles left out of the male-dominated canon. Her canvases ask: what if we didn’t accept the gaps in these women’s lives? What if we imagined them into our own?

Context matters – and Biblical Women Ageing Disgracefully is exhibited not in a white-walled gallery but in Chester’s Grosvenor Precinct, having previously shown at Chester’s cultural centre Storyhouse. The location is deliberate. These Madonnas and menopausal saints appear exactly where they live now: among shopping bags, toddler tantrums and the quiet sighs of women holding it all together.

Meeting Eve, Mary, Bathsheba, Susanna and Lot’s wife in a shopping centre creates a surreal and poignant dissonance. It collapses the sacred and the ordinary, and invites viewers to see their own lives reflected in these ancient figures.

Messy, mortal and magnificent

It’s a risk, of course, putting menopause, motherhood, grief, housework and rape culture centre stage. There’s a version of this exhibition that could have been grim. But Lightman’s palette is anything but dour. Her watercolours are vibrant and playful, her titles sharp with satire. These women aren’t tragic martyrs; they’re exhausted, yes, but also knowing, cheeky and in on the joke.

Lightman treats art history not as a fixed monument, but as a toolkit to be deconstructed and rebuilt. She gives her saints their bodies back – saggy, sweaty, miraculous – and their agency too.

What makes Biblical Women Ageing Disgracefully so powerful is its embrace of contradiction. It is sacred and silly, sincere and subversive, heartbreaking and hilarious. It is, in essence, a feminist midrash in watercolour: retelling holy stories through the grit and glory of contemporary womanhood, and holding them close even as it pushes them open.

Biblical Women Ageing Disgracefully is on display at Chester Visual Arts, Grovesnor Shopping Centre until July 13.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.