Persephone’s Tears (After Man Ray), is part of a body of work inspired by the Greek myth of Persephone, which portrays the sadness of being abandoned by a lover, (as in Man Ray's lament to the loss of Lee Miller) but also the exquisite sadness of longing that informs the poetry of the Greek Myth.

This piece is a key work in a collection that plays with the contradictions of both the rejection and the desire to be viewed by the male gaze, a duality between the personal and the political, that McCaig locates in Persephone, who spends half her life on earth, and half her life in the underworld.