Creative labour
A moving all-female show explores what it means to be a mother
Simone Steenberg’s empowering images of pregnant women, Eve Arnold’s black and white photograph of a newborn baby held aloft by a nurse and Aimee Gilmore’s eerily beautiful prints made with breast milk are among the works to go on display at Richard Saltoun this winter. The two-part exhibition, which concludes the gallery’s year-long programme ‘100% Women’, will explore maternal themes in art.
‘I wanted to move away from the term “motherhood” because it has been co-opted by consumerism,’ says the curator Catherine McCormack. ‘What these artists are really looking for is a new language that embodies the full psychological and emotional experience of becoming a mother.’ The title of the first show, ‘Matrescence’, comes from an anthropological term that describes precisely this process, while the second, ‘Maternality’, refers to the etymological links between motherhood and matter, focusing on the material realities of pregnancy and birth.
Several of the featured artists subvert the quintessential mother-and-son portrait – that of the Virgin Mary and Jesus, a pairing depicted almost exclusively through a male gaze – by offering a more realistic interpretation of what it means to bear a child. Leni Dothan’s looped film Sleeping Madonna shows a young mother dozing off as she breastfeeds her son, while Liv Pennington’s Private View examines the idea of an unexpected pregnancy. The piece has its origins in a performative event where a group of 40 women agreed to take a pregnancy test and have their results relayed publicly in real time; Pennington subsequently used these to create a composite print. Thus, what looks from a distance to be a beautifully minimalist work of geometric abstraction turns out, like so many of the works in this exhibition, to conceal deeply personal and emotional stories. fh ‘Matrescence’ is at the Richard Saltoun Gallery (www.richardsaltoun. com) from 15 November to 21 December. ‘Maternality’ will open on 10 January 2020.