| Project title: | allegory and ambivalence: the unmasking of a good m[other] |
| Location: | Exeter, Devon & London, UK |
| Date (s): | September 2024 |
Artist statement
I paint to remember how things felt. I paint to know how things feel. I paint because I am scared that my children will not remember how much I love them when I have died. Painting goes beyond my mortality.
I am a figurative artist, using the act of figuration as biographical and psychotherapeutic expression. The main themes in my practice are mothering and loss, connecting an embodied sense of preciousness with the pain, vulnerability, rage, and hidden despair that accompanies my experiences of mothering.
Contextual statement
Project description
My final major project, allegory and ambivalence: the unmasking of a good m[other], is a body of work created through practice-based research, introspection, and lived experience in response to a two-year collaboration with the Foundling Museum, London. The Museum provided an informal residency, enabling me to engage with the collections and archives of the Foundling Hospital; established to care for babies at risk of abandonment.
The work activates a core conversation around m[othering] and burdens of care. It was originally destined to be exhibited in the Museum. However, due to unforeseen circumstances, an alternative installation event was held in my local community centre, along with speaking to a public audience at a Daylight Collective event at Exeter Phoenix. The work still operates within the context of a museum, derived from its methodology, and includes a painting, three-dimensional pieces, and a domestically-set film about the project.
Other collaborations included Devon Metal Craft, who turned my wax sculptures into bonzes, and a joinery firm, SDS Joinery and Mouldings, who reimagined my sketch into a birch ply jigsaw, providing a new, innovative surface.
Methodology and methods
Through this work, ‘yes and methodology’ and the activation of haptic responses, I challenge pervasive narratives, and the incongruous relationship between my lived experience and the concept of a ‘good mother’.
Context of the work
For me, pregnancy epitomised the most perfect of all maternal connections. My blood to your blood; I am microchimeric (Jones, 2023;49). However: ‘Take ‘mothering’, still upheld in our culture as the archetypal caring relationship, but one whose practises are so rigidly idealised that they may often burden even those women who desire the role.’ (The Care Collective 2020: 33)
I felt guilty about the less than perfect parts of my mothering. ‘Mothers can pursue an excessively giving, hyper-altruistic mode with their children in an attempt to gain absolution for those impulses which fill them with guilt.’ (Parker 1995:185)
The painting acts as a provocation. It tells the story and the sculptures activate it. Can handling in art be a conduit for discussions around burdens of care? ‘…to touch something is to situate oneself in relation to it,’ (Berger 1972: 8). I believe that this relationality was essential for the activation of the core conversation.
Juxtaposing materials are brought together, gold and wood, textile and bronze, informed by Louise Bourgeois; herself a figurative artist situated within feminist practice. All the pieces were created for a museum exhibition and deliberately feel like objects you might find in one, priming audiences and invoking historical connotations.
To manage the number of babies received into the Foundling Hospital, women had to publicly pull out a ball from a bag; a white ball meant that the baby could be admitted, a black ball meant that the baby was turned away. My bronze babies fit into a hand, like the balls.
The invitation to interact with pieces means that their curation is fluid, informed by Viviana Checchia’s theories around the circulatory, creating new experiences with each deliberate act of curation.
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Project documentation
