LIFE LINES
Chantal Joffe’s intimate portraits of her family capture how their relationships have changed through time
When she paints her loved ones, Chantal Joffe returns time and again to a Doris Lessing quote: ‘The further up the tree you go, the view keeps changing.’ Having chronicled her mother and family in her work over the past 30 years, Joffe has had a marked shift in perspective, from seeing them grow with age and becoming a mother herself. ‘It’s much easier to be the daughter than it is to be the mother,’ she says. ‘It gives you another layer of empathy for your mum and the expansive endurance of mothers: they do everything and they’re blamed for everything.’
This emotional insight has shaped a new series of paintings portraying her own mother Daryll, which will be on display at Victoria Miro this summer. Titled ‘Story’, the exhibition takes its name from the artist’s 2020 canvas depicting herself and her two sisters as children, huddled beside their parent for a bedtime tale. The scene feels universal, relating not just to Joffe’s childhood, but that of the observer, too, capturing the familiar intimacy of overlapping limbs and the warm post-bath cosiness of leaning into a good book. These are the moments that interest Joffe the most. ‘For me, the only subjects are the things that are my life,’ she says, ‘but I get inspiration just walking around. I love to see the incredible variety of relationships, from the child dawdling with a hand on the wall to a toddler trying to eat rubbish off the pavement.’
The show jumps through time, comprising portraits painted in person as well as taken from old family photographs. Joffe shares glimpses of her mother in the present day – alone with a bandaged eye following a cataract operation, and sitting beside her naked adult daughter; in others, her past is captured through ‘fragments of memory – a kind of story we tell ourselves’, says Joffe. ‘To try and imagine your mum’s life is a kind of fiction,’ she explains, observing how difficult it is to see her as anything other than ‘a mother’. This idea is reflected perhaps most poignantly in My Mother in a Blue
Shawl in her Doorway, where the artist immortalises Daryll draped in a lapis-lazuli-blue fabric reminiscent of the Madonna’s cloak. By presenting her in the form of this enduring symbol of motherhood, Joffe conveys a sense that, regardless of how the view changes as we climb the tree, our mothers will remain our touchstone. brooke theis ‘Chantal Joffe: Story’ is at Victoria Miro (www.victoria-miro.com) until 31 July.