Motherhood & art: a gallery confronts the invisible labor
The National Gallery of Victoria’s new exhibition, Mother, isn’t a sentimental ode to maternal bliss. Instead, it’s a bracing confrontation with the often-erased realities of motherhood, a subject explored through over 200 works spanning centuries and cultures. It’s a show born from a shared experience – the relentless demands of early parenting – and a desire to finally make visible the labor that so often goes unacknowledged.
The echo of kollwitz: creativity and exhaustion
The exhibition’s opening observation resonates deeply. Käthe Kollwitz, reflecting on her artmaking later in life, famously said she worked “like a cow grazes.” A seemingly innocuous comparison reveals a sobering truth: the absence of child-rearing demands, rather than unleashing creative freedom, had diminished her artistic urgency. Many mothers, myself included, understand this keenly; the frenetic energy of raising children paradoxically fuels a certain kind of productivity, a necessary compression of time and effort that dissipates when that structure vanishes.
Mother doesn't shy away from the fraught relationship between artistic creation and the demands of childcare. It begins, pointedly, with the Virgin Mary, the archetype of Western motherhood, often idealized to an impossible standard. The exhibition smartly juxtaposes this iconic image with Elizabeth Djutarra’s woven birthing skirts – raw, visceral reminders of the physical realities of birth that are so often sanitized from the Madonna’s representation.
The curators, Sophie Gerhard and Katharina Prugger, both navigating the complexities of young motherhood alongside their curatorial duties, have assembled a collection that exposes the historical silencing of maternal experience. Rosselli’s 15th-century Mother and Child with Three Angels, for instance, displays a disturbing erosion of the mother's form, a visual metaphor for the fading of her presence over time.
The invisible hand: labor, erasure, and repetition
The exhibition's core strength lies in its exploration of maternal labor – the unseen scaffolding that supports so much of human existence. Queen Victoria’s sketch of her infant daughter, where the nurse holding the child is nearly obscured, is a particularly potent example. A series of 19th-century photographs further reinforces this theme: meticulously posed infants, their mothers lurking in the background, patiently holding them steady for the protracted exposures – anonymous figures ensuring the creation of a perfect image.
Davida Allen's 1989 work, Baby, offers a more unsettling ambiguity, leaving the viewer to question whether the mother is reaching out to nurture or, perhaps, restrain. But it’s in the images of mothers at rest – entwined with their children’s limbs – that the exhibition finds its most poignant resonance. A forgotten bliss, a quiet abandonment, made all the more precious by the preceding exhaustion.
Beyond repetition: creativity in the mundane
What’s surprising is the exhibition’s demonstration that repetition, a hallmark of motherhood, need not stifle creativity. Kate Just’s An Armour of Hope, a knitted metal and silk creation for her adopted son, exemplifies this beautifully. Each stitch, a reiteration of the previous one, culminates in a powerful declaration of love and protection. Similarly, Kyra Mancktelow reclaims her maternal history through traditional textiles, recreating a dress her mother was forced to wear at a mission, while Guruwuy Murrinyina echoes her mother’s meticulous style in a series of intricate linear gestures.
The exhibition is divided into three sections – creating, giving, and leaving – each offering a different facet of the maternal experience. From miscarriage and infant loss to the joyful embrace of a golden, hybrid creature in Patricia Piccinini’s Nest, Mother confronts the full spectrum of emotions. Even humor finds its place, in Tala Madani's playfully subversive image of a nursing mother.
The final section, “leaving,” brought a particular ache. As my own daughter, now 18, increasingly seeks her own space, a bittersweet awareness dawns: the intimacy of our shared bed, once a nightly ritual, is becoming a rare occurrence. The detachment, inevitable as it is, carries a quiet sadness, a reminder of the cyclical nature of motherhood – a process of depletion and renewal, of relinquishment that, paradoxically, fuels a new kind of creative energy.
Mother doesn't offer easy answers. It simply presents a complex, multifaceted portrait of an experience that has shaped art and culture for centuries, finally giving voice to the often-unseen labor that lies at its heart. The exhibition’s power lies not in sentimentality, but in its unflinching honesty – a recognition that motherhood is not an ideal, but a messy, relentless, and ultimately transformative journey.