…the 'good mother' becomes a trap a slogan a catch word to use against or seduce you with literally a devil a wolf in sheep's clothing and it turns you the poor + silly sheep into a revengeful world
Louise Bourgeois, 'The Return of the Repressed, Volume II', 1957
Picturing the mother, we imagine the nursing Madonna, young and sweet-faced, with a pudgy infant. But these years of pregnancy, birth and breastfeeding are only the start.
Re-Naissance explores what comes next – works about parenthood made after years of reflection, reactions to the changing relationship with our bodies or our children, personal experiences placed within a chain of familial relationships stretching back across generations. Re-Naissance explores themes of culture, legacy and power through the work of artists with very different experiences of (m)otherhood, among them a number whose caregiving responsibilities made it difficult to make or show work.
Culture
What are the archetypes available for the mother?
The Madonna Lactans? The Pietà? The wholesome “natural” mother idealised by Jacques Rousseau? The Victorian angel in the house? The strong and stoic worker? The yummy mummy? The MILF? Works by Hermione Wiltshire and Clare Bottomley, Leni Dothan and Whitney McVeigh bring historic imagery around motherhood into the present day, proposing new archetypes for our consideration. The mother body itself is a vessel for culture – source of our mother tongue – a cultural legacy explored by Permindar Kaur.
Hermione Wiltshire and Clare Bottomley’s research-led series The Birth of the Image revisits and disrupts familiar biblical tableaux, exploring the legacy of Renaissance paintings in our view of maternity and the female body. BIRTH SCENE restages the nativity from a midwife’s perspective, honouring a lineage of female knowledge stretching back to prehistory. In The Predictor, Gabriel hands Mary the first home pregnancy test, designed by Margaret Crane in the 1960s.
Wiltshire & Bottomley
Hermione Wiltshire & Clare Bottomley
The Predictor, The Birth of the Image
2020
100 x 140 cm
Ed. 8 + 2AP
Hermione Wiltshire & Clare Bottomley
BIRTH SCENE – POV: Midwife, The Birth of the Image
2020
160 x 120 cm
Ed. 8 + 2AP
Clare Bottomley, who was born in Gloucester, currently lives and works in Helsinki. With a background in documentary photography, her MA at the Royal College of Art (2013) led to a research interest in hybrid documentary methods and self-representation. As an artist and academic, she explores individual autonomy in the act of looking, with the aim of challenging established authorities of visuality.
Collaboration plays an important role in Bottomley’s practice, which utilises collective approaches to photography, video and participatory workshops, working closely with communities affected by social inequalities. Recent exhibitions include Landing, Falmouth University, Cornwall (2022); The Ruth Borchard Collection’s Self-Portrait Prize 2021, Coventry Cathedral (2021); Media Futures, Goldsmiths University, London (2020); and Headway East London Film and Video Club Installation, Barbican, London (2019).
Hermione Wiltshire (b. 1963) holds a BA in Sculpture from Central Saint Martins and an MA from Chelsea School of Art. Combining photography and sculpture, her multidisciplinary practice references art history and contemporary culture to consider questions of the representation of women, maternity and self-image from a feminist perspective.
Wiltshire is a Senior Tutor in Photography at the Royal College of Art, in addition to acting as External Assessor at Central Saint Martins and Hull. She was a fellow at Tate Liverpool, where her work was included in Elective Affinities (1993). She was also a scholar at the British School of Rome and has complete several major series in Italy. Her work is in national and international collections, including the Arts Council, Walker Art Gallery and Weltkunst Collection.
Twelve years ago, Dothan filmed herself dozing as she breastfed her son, bringing the bone-tiredness of early motherhood into the iconography of the Madonna and Child. Completing a cycle of work challenging imagery of the perfect, self-sacrificing Christian mother figure, in Playing Dead | Pieta she adopts the position of the grieving Madonna with her son – who is now 13, the age Jewish boys symbolically become men – and asks him to play dead, which he does with melodramatic flourish.
Leni Dothan
Leni Dothan
Playing Dead | Pieta
2022
Video, 2:46 min
Ed. 2/5 + AP
Leni Dothan (b. 1981) is an Israeli-born artist, architect and researcher based in London, where she received her MFA (2015) and PhD (2019) from the Slade School of Fine Art. She focuses her skills and knowledge on the overlooked representations of women – especially mothers – in art history and contemporary culture, as well as urgent eco-political subjects.
Dothan has exhibited her work in museums around the world, including The Jewish Museum, London; MAMbo Museum, Bologna; and Centre Régional d’Art Contemporain Occitanie, France. Recent solo exhibitions include Here to Stay, permanent public sculpture commissioned by b-side, Portland (2021) and MOTHERCHILD Machine no. 7, commissioned by Procreate Project, Guy’s Chapel, King’s College, London (2019). Group exhibitions in 2022 include Birth Rites Collection, University of Kent and Eye of the Collector with MTArt, London.
Kaur brings the uncanny to familiar and otherwise comforting domestic objects. Her teddy bears are subtly unbalanced, their animal nature betrayed by copper claws or horns. The archetypal Western toy is dressed up in a sequinned gown and bestowed a female Indian identity in Red Dress, while the Blue Indian Teddy carries the outsized horns of a prehistoric animal. They become hybrid figures – British-Indian, beastly playthings.
Permindar Kaur
Permindar Kaur
Blue Indian Teddy
2021
58 x 28 x 20 cm
Permindar Kaur
Red Dress
2011
40 x 16 x 11 cm
Permindar Kaur
Indian Teddy
2012
58 x 20 x 11 cm
Permindar Kaur (b. 1965) is a multidisciplinary artist with an MA in Fine Art from Glasgow School of Art (1992). Her work investigates cultural identity and childhood, integration and belonging. She uses simple forms, such as furniture and toys that resemble displaced domestic belongings, which are distorted and manipulated to invoke the uncanny.
Solo exhibitions include Home, 5 Howick Place, London (2020–21); Interlopers, University of Hertfordshire (2016); and Hiding Out, Lakeside Arts, Nottingham (2014). Notable group exhibitions include Breaking the Mould: Sculpture by Women since 1945, Yorkshire Sculpture Park (2021); Ikon in the 90s, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (2021); Animals & Us, Turner Contemporary, Margate (2018); and At Home with Art, Tate Britain, London (2000).
Delving through archival materials, old photographs and Early Renaissance imagery, McVeigh’s mother and child drawings are informed by fragments of family histories and personal memories as well as maternal figures discovered in her research. These points of reference are present but seldom explicit – working with fragile rice paper, she describes letting the ink fall and then following it in a process of “controlled freedom”.
Whitney McVeigh
Whitney McVeigh
Mother and Child
2018
33 x 24.5 cm
Whitney McVeigh
Mother and Child
2019
26.5 x 24 cm
Whitney McVeigh
Mother and Child
2019
33 x 29 cm
Whitney McVeigh
Mother and Child
2018
37 x 25 cm
Whitney McVeigh (b. 1968) is an American visual artist and writer who holds a BA in Fine Art from Edinburgh College of Art (1996). Her work investigates personal and collective memory, alluding to the layering of time, as well as the complexity and dual layers of the body. She has amassed a studio collection of objects that bear traces of their former lives and relationships to individuals.
Recent solo exhibitions include Temporality, Cardi Projects (2020), What is Worthwhile Doing in this World, Mount Stuart Visual Arts, Scotland (2019); and Elegy to Nature, Eykyn Maclean, New York (2018). Recent group exhibitions include New Drawings, GIO Silk Road Huaxing Art Museum, Beijing (2023); Frieze Masters, London with Eykyn Maclean (2022); Photo London, Somerset House (2021) and What Remains, Encounter Gallery, London (2021).
Legacy
In winter, vegetation retreats back into the earth-womb; and in death the human body, too, returns into that womb, to await rebirth.
Adrienne Rich, 'Of Woman Born', 1976
A pregnant body carrying a female embryo holds within it the eggs that might go on to create the next generation.
This dizzying lineage is evoked in the pillowy, podding swirls of Kinke Kooi’s paintings. Working in performance, photography and embroidery, Jessa Fairbrother asks what is lost when that maternal line is broken. Annie Hsiao-Ching Wang’s ongoing self-portrait series charts the traces of past selves as the maternal body experiences its own transforming identity and a changing relationship with the child. Photographing four generations of women within her family, Asia Werbel finds parallels across the generations.
In the ongoing self-portrait series The Mother as a Creator, we see Wang at different points on her maternal journey, receding back in time to the point of origin: her swollen belly. In these carefully staged portraits, Wang presents herself and her son as united but distinct: she performs for the camera as a working artist and a scholar, a very different vision of maternity from the stoic, self-sacrificing mother of Taiwanese tradition.
Annie Hsiao-Ching Wang
Annie Hsiao-Ching Wang
The Mother as a Creator No. 1, The day before I was due to give birth
2001
39 x 26 cm
Annie Hsiao-Ching Wang
The Mother as a Creator No. 2, Pressing the camera shutter together
2002
39 x 26 cm
Annie Hsiao-Ching Wang
The Mother as a Creator No. 3, My son’s leg was in plaster
2003
39 x 26 cm
Annie Hsiao-Ching Wang
The Mother as a Creator No. 4, Celebrating Christmas
2004
39 x 26 cm
Annie Hsiao-Ching Wang
The Mother as a Creator No. 5, Setting up the exhibition
2005
39 x 26 cm
Annie Hsiao-Ching Wang
The Mother as a Creator No. 6, Working hard
2006
39 x 26 cm
Annie Hsiao-Ching Wang
The Mother as a Creator No. 7, Moving and uncertain
2010
39 x 26 cm
Annie Hsiao-Ching Wang
The Mother as a Creator No. 8, Making dreams
2011
39 x 26 cm
Annie Hsiao-Ching Wang
The Mother as a Creator No. 9, At the same height
2014
39 x 26 cm
Annie Hsiao-Ching Wang
The Mother as a Creator No. 10, Arguing for freedom
2018
39 x 26 cm
Annie Hsiao-Ching Wang
The Mother as a Creator No. 11, Long-distance relationship
2020
39 x 26 cm
Annie Hsiao-Ching Wang
The Mother as a Creator No. 12, Happy 50th Birthday
2022
39 x 26 cm
Annie Hsiao-Ching Wang (b. 1972) is a Taiwanese artist with a PhD in Art from the University of Brighton. Her multimedia practice focuses on female identity and creativity, highlighting the often-overlooked role of motherhood while challenging its conventions. She is director of Ching Tien Art Space and assistant professor in the Department of Arts and Design, National Dong Hwa University.
Selected solo exhibitions include Women’s Time 20 30 40, Good Underground Art Space, Hualien (2018); A Time Project, Pine Garden, Hualien (2016) and Picturing Motherhood, University of Brighton (2005). Her work has been shown at AIPAD in New York; Les Mesnographies Festival de Photo in France, Photolux Festival in Italy, International Festival of Photography in Australia and SHERO at the Tainan Art Museum, Taiwan.
There is an elegiac quality to many of the photographs in Werbel’s Mother, Daughter series, suggesting the loss bound up in the passing years and procession of maternity from one generation to the next. In intimate detail, Werbel charts the shifting relationships and transfer of care between her mother, her daughter and her young granddaughters, suggesting patterns of behaviour, stories and memories repeating themselves across the generations.
Asia Werbel
Asia Werbel
The Moments You Miss
2021
20 x 30.5 cm
Asia Werbel
Mother, Daughter
2020
20.3 x 25.4 cm
Asia Werbel
Sleeper
2023
20 x 30.5 cm
Asia Werbel
Veil
2023
20 x 30.5 cm
Asia Werbel
Ritual
2023
20 x 30.5 cm
Asia Werbel
Sacrifice
2020
20 x 30.5 cm
Asia Werbel
The Tantrum Days
2022
20 x 20 cm
Asia Werbel
Mama and Child
2020
30.5 x 20 cm
Asia Werbel is a London-based portrait and documentary photographer with a particular interest in fashion. A former student of Winchester School of Art and Central Saint Martins, Werbel is a self-taught photographer. Her practice captures precious moments of truth, revealing what is often hidden behind a façade – an approach and aesthetic that connects her fashion documentary work with more personal projects.
Selected group exhibitions include Constructive Disruption, Parkside Gallery, Birmingham (2023) and Walking Distance – Fashion on a different route, Centrala Space, Birmingham (2020). Her work has been published in several magazines, such as W, Love, Dazed and Wonderland, as well as exhibited at Printspace, A Lady Named Instant and The Photocopy Club.
Following the death of her own mother, Fairbrother has addressed the implications of being childless not by choice – the last of her maternal line. Exploring this deeply personal territory, in Role Play she performs the mother body in embellished photographs stitched into a quilt – a domestic object that speaks of maternal lineage. In The things I thought I’d pass on, care and nurture are expressed in fine embroidery, overlaying photographs of family objects readied for children that did not come to be.
Jessa Fairbrother
Jessa Fairbrother
Role Play (woman with cushion)
2017
120 x 120 cm
Jessa Fairbrother
The things I thought I’d pass on
2020
27 x 19 cm
Jessa Fairbrother
The things I thought I’d pass on
2020
27 x 19 cm
Jessa Fairbrother
The things I thought I’d pass on
2020
27 x 19 cm
Jessa Fairbrother
The things I thought I’d pass on
2020
27 x 19 cm
Jessa Fairbrother is a British artist based in Bristol, who concentrates on themes of yearning and the porous body. Initially training as an actor in the 1990s, followed by an MA in Photographic Studies at the University of Westminster (2010), amplified her knowledge of how artwork and audience collide. Using her own body as material, she produces work encompassing photography, performance and stitching.
Recent solo exhibitions include A sense of place, Bristol Museum and Art Gallery (2021) and Constellations and Coordinates, The Photographers’ Gallery, London (2019). Selected group exhibitions include Turning Points: Through the Eyes of Bristol Women Artists, Royal West of England Academy, Bristol (2023); Mother, Serchia Gallery, Bristol (2023); Conversations with my mother (online), Griffin Museum of Photography, Winchester (2023); and 20 Years of Anzenberger Gallery, Anzenberger Gallery,Vienna (2022).
Kooi’s captivating, claustrophobic paintings are packed tight as viscera, swirling like fractal patterns, suggesting dividing cells, seeds, strands of DNA, patterns of production, reproduction, protection and care. Part animal, part vegetable, they place the maternal body within a legacy that extends beyond the human.
Kinke Kooi
Kinke Kooi
The Grotesk of Raising
2015
101 x 66 cm
Kinke Kooi
The Grotesk of Raising II
2018
102 x 73 cm
Kinke Kooi
The Grotesk of Yielding
2015
101 x 66 cm
Kinke Kooi (b. 1961, Leeuwarden) attended the Academy for the Visual Arts in Arnhem, Netherlands, where she lives and works. She explores themes pertinent to femininity, seeking to counteract the one-dimensional portrayal of women in visual culture. Her sensuous, undulating organic forms create a vision of the natural world as an interconnected whole.
Solo exhibitions have been held at Edouard Montassut, Paris (2023); Lulu, Mexico City (2022); Adams and Ollman, Portland (2021); Galerie Bernhard, Zurich (2021); Lucas Hirsch, Düsseldorf (2020); and Exile, Vienna (2020). Her work is in the permanent collections of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Arnhem Museum; Rijksmuseum Twente, Enschede; Fries Museum, Leeuwarden; and Tang Teaching Museum, Saratoga Springs.
Power
We must destroy all these notions of love, faith, family, motherhood, companionship, which were not created by us and thus replace them with new ones in accordance with our sensibility, with our wishes.
VALIE EXPORT, 'Women’s Art: A Manifesto', 1973
The goddess movement associated with second wave feminism celebrated the “great mother” as a powerful unifying deity – a fertile point of origin.
How might that mythic potency translate into lived experiences of motherhood? As a cultural figure the mother is a comic trope – fussy, nagging, eccentric. The artists Elsa James, Emma Franks, Helen Sargeant and Ingrid Berthon-Moine argue that we might instead see her as the embodiment of power – strong, wise, capable, fierce and even angry.
The transformational early work 150 Lies Myths and Truths finds James, heavily pregnant, contemplating what it means to bring a Black woman into the world. Across her naked belly are projected labels waiting to be affixed to her, from racial slurs to gendered pejoratives to terms of affection. Unspoken is the 151st myth – Michele Wallace’s ‘myth of superwoman’ – the expectation that a Black mother be supernaturally strong and capable. Instead, James creates a space to express fears for her unborn child.
Elsa James
Elsa James
150 Lies Myths and Truths
2006
Video
Elsa James (b. 1968) is a British conceptual artist and activist based in Essex. She completed a BA in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Arts (2010) and a Postgraduate Certificate in Participatory and Community Arts at Goldsmiths (2015). She works across live performance, film, prints, spoken word, neon and sound, exploring the historical, temporal and spatial dimensions of what it means to be Black in Essex.
James’ work has recently been shown at various venues across London: Birkbeck Cinema (2023): Tate Britain (2023); Gagosian (2023); TJ Boulting (2022); South London Gallery (2022); Goldsmiths CCA (2022). She has also shown at Art Exchange, Colchester (2023); Focal Point Gallery, Southend (2022); and RadicalxChange Conference, New York (2020). She was a finalist for the Freelands Award (2021) and recipient of the Henry Moore Foundation Artists Award (2023).
How do we uncouple the depiction of power from the implication of violence? Inspired by an older generation of Jewish feminist artists (notably Nancy Spero) Franks looks to the ancient world and beyond patriarchal religions to find unruly power figures – among them Lilith, a mythic demon said to have been Adam’s first wife, exiled from Eden. In Mambivalence, she summons motherhood in all its complexity – as a creative act, at once stained in blood and suffused with tenderness.
Emma Franks
Emma Franks
Get Me Out of Here
2022
120 x 100 cm
Emma Franks
Mambivalence
2023
120 x 100 cm
Emma Franks
She She She
2022
120 x 100 cm
Emma Franks (b. 1972, Essex) lives and works in London. She studied Fine Art at Brighton University (1994), Art Psychotherapy at Hertfordshire University (1999) and Studio Painting at Turps Banana Art School (2023). She creates paintings, costumes, sculptures, artist books and performs live music. Her deeply personal practice combines lived experiences with strong imagery and personal symbols of power, as well as feminist icons, in rebelliously humorous works.
Franks previously worked within state education and the National Health Service, in addition to being a practising artist. Recent exhibitions in London include Turps Banana Leavers Show and Recreational Grounds VII (2023); Love, Celebration and the Road Ahead, TJ Boulting (2022); Mood Times Ten, Fitzrovia Gallery (2022); 50:50, Highgate Literary and Scientific Institution (2019); and The Stratford Gallery (2018).
Sargeant’s embroidered cyanotypes, made with spring wildflowers, speak to the cyclical nature of the seasons and the latent power contained within both the Earth and the maternal body. Early anatomical drawings of the female breast simplified the system of milk ducts to resemble bundles of flower heads, as though the mother’s milk itself was blooming. In Sargeant’s work, the lactating breast appears as a kind of personal emblem, a symbol of matriarchal power.
Helen Sargeant
Helen Sargeant
Rage Rage Rage
2022
44 x 43 cm
Helen Sargeant
Love & Be-Loved
2023
26 x 40 cm
Helen Sargeant
Cherry Blossom Bosoms
2023
25 x 35 cm
Helen Sargeant
Dandelion Clock & Blackthorn Boob, Cot Valley Series
2023
19 x 17 cm
Helen Sargeant
Primrose Boob, Cot Valley Series
2023
18 x 18 cm
Helen Sargeant
Blue Bell Boobs: Dobroyd Woods, Todmorden
2023
37 x 37 cm
Helen Sargeant (b. 1971) is a British interdisciplinary artist with a BA in Painting from Winchester School of Art (1994) and an MA in Creative Technology from University of Salford (2000). Her autobiographical practice explores embodied memories of pregnancy, birth, and mothering through drawing, writing, painting, printing, stitching and performance. She creates work about the emotional and physical labour of mothering, not shying away from its messy realities.
Recent and forthcoming solo exhibitions include Mother & Daughter, Haworth Art Gallery, Accrington (2024); She Sews, UNIT 14, Todmorden (2023); and My Mother Is Beautiful (after Yoko Ono), Linden Art Gallery, Hebden Bridge (2021). Her work has also been in group exhibitions at Modern Art Oxford (2023); Kingsmill House, Dursley (2023); The Whitaker, Rawtenstall (2022); and UWE Bristol (2022).
In her paintings and sculptures, Berthon-Moine works with biomorphic forms that hint at soft and private anatomies of all (and often blended) genders. Working with materials that suggest skin, wetness and bodily liquids, she carries us on an intimate journey from the foetus held in the liquid touch of amniotic fluid in Liquid Internship, to the tear-like traces of pink salt in the death-black gloss of Over and Done and Do It Again.
Ingrid Berthon-Moine
Ingrid Berthon-Moine
Liquid Internship
2023
25 x 20 cm
Ingrid Berthon-Moine
Plump
2020
61 x 45 cm
Ingrid Berthon-Moine
Not Avoiding the Void
2020
61 x 45 cm
Ingrid Berthon-Moine
Over and Done and Do it Again
2023
40 x 30 cm
Ingrid Berthon-Moine is a French visual artist based in London. She holds an MA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths (2017) and an MA in Photography from London College of Communication (2009). In sculptures, paintings and installations, Berthon-Moine uses the human body as a playground for exploring identity, sexuality and consumerism. In this way, she examines the de/construction of gender identity and its behavioural consequences in society.
Recent solo exhibitions in London include It’s Getting Clawser, Fitzrovia Gallery (2022) and You Tear Us, Kelder Projects (2018). Selected group exhibitions include Recreational Grounds VII, Wendover House, London (2023); Try a little… Tenderness, Liminal Gallery, Margate (2023); Love, Celebration and the Road Ahead, TJ Boulting, London (2022); Mãe, 55SP, São Paulo (2022); Mothering, Kupfer, London (2022) and Faire Corps, Galerie Paris-Beijing, Paris (2021).
Exhibition
Naissance
The first of two online exhibitions about making art and making children, focused on experiences of new parenthood.
Essay by Hettie Judah
Full, Messy and Beautiful
An essay on the challenges that artist mothers face, from the Freelands Foundation report on female artists’ representation in Britain.
Hettie Judah is chief art critic on the British daily paper The i, a regular contributor to The Guardian’s arts pages, and a columnist for Apollo magazine. Following publication of her 2020 study on the impact of motherhood on artists’ careers, in 2021 she worked with a group of artists to draw up the manifesto How Not To Exclude Artist Parents, now available in 15 languages. She recently published the book How Not To Exclude Artist Mothers (and other parents) (Lund Humphries, 2022) and her work in this field includes the Hayward Touring exhibition On Art and Motherhood (opening at Arnolfini, Bristol in March 2024) and an accompanying publication. In 2022, together with Jo Harrison, she co-founded the Art Working Parents Alliance – a supportive network and campaigning group for those working in the arts.
Chosen Charity
NARAL Pro-Choice America
The 4 million members of NARAL Pro-Choice America fight for reproductive freedom for every body. Each day, we organise and mobilise to protect that freedom by fighting for access to abortion care, birth control, paid parental leave, and protections from pregnancy discrimination.