Artist Statement
The context of my work is firmly entrenched in who I am and who many women are. I am a mother. This title allows me access to wonders never known before; the joy on your child’s face when you go to the park; the anxiety and heart break when your child’s in hospital and sometimes your child can drive you so mad you want to put your head through a wall. I wouldn’t miss it for the world.
“My children cause me the most exquisite suffering of which I have any experience. It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw edged nerves and blissful gratification.” Adrienne Rich 1977
With motherhood comes an endless amount of chores and it is the combination of the domestic and motherhood that are prominent in my work. I also use fairytales as an underlying source of inspiration. Relating fairytale characters to who we are as women.
I have spent my time during the Master of Fine Art (Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design) researching into motherhood, the domestic and fairytales. I am now translating this into art works. I am also building on the visual research I have conducted over the past year. The images include work by Jo Spence, Rineke Dijkstra , Kiki Smith, along with photographs taken at an Egyptology exhibition in Berlin and photos of my daughter. Contextualising the images into subject areas and visual connections I make works which are reactions to these image groups, almost like a visual conversation between the images and myself. This conversation has translated into a number of dolls.
In the final year of my undergraduate (also Duncan of Jordanstone) I made dolls to show the research I had done into the archaeology of self, each of the six dolls showed events, which had happened in my life. I boxed the dolls to keep them safe and the memories precious. The dolls were about 42 cm long. From the start of the Masters I moved away from the dolls and tried other media, including video but these works weren’t particularly successful. Over this year I have come full circle back to the dolls but this time they are bigger, less prescriptive and have deeper and different meanings.
For me, the deeper meaning behind my work is about separating being a woman from being a mother and how hard this can be. The research into fairytales as metaphor, combined with the collected images influence the outward appearance. By hand sewing the figures and constructing a large patchwork, I am bringing in my research into the history of the domestic roles of women and the trend, at the beginning of the century onward, for domestic education.