Mamas in the hood

Dear Bloggers this is where I have been over the last few months preparing, organising and making for 'Mamas in the hood'  exhibited at Pine Rivers Art Gallery October 5th - November 5th 2011.

The show is over now. However alot of the work exhibited was installation work, so I had to wait for my work to be installed before photographing. And with all my other committments and workshops this has been the only available time that I have had to post any photographs of the event. So please sit back and let me take you through 'Mamas in the hood'.

 photograph by Mari Hirata

Mamas in the hood (please go here to see essay for 'Mamas in the hood' by Helen Sturgess MVA)

This exhibition examines the contrasting roles of mother and artist; challenging cultural values that keep mothers and their art hidden and 'chained to the kitchen'.
'Mamas in the Hood' is an analysis and a celebration of a mother’s role; how it relates to contemporary society, the challenges, identities, memories and stories it creates.

Four artists have united to present works ranging from craft to new media.

Candice Herne’s piñata installation, and butterfly cutouts explore ideas of collaboration and connection within the family and the community.

Sandra Landolt's moving objects stand as metaphors for change and for her experiences of living away from her family and her Swiss upbringing.

Katrina Stirling illustrates personal journeys, memories and stories onto rusted bed sheets.

Chrys Zantis plays with the computer generation; displaying luscious, playful and feminine knitted and crochet objects.

"Functioning on different levels as a partner, mother and staying true to yourself is a real challenge" – Sandra Landolt.

photograph by Nadine Sawyer

School

A collaboration by Candice Herne with family, friends, community and the mothers and children of Montville and the Blackall Range. Papier mâché fish pinatas, tissue paper, pom poms.
This installation is a community arts project. A grass roots project collaborating with members of my community who do not usually engage in the arts.

As an artist and mother with my first child starting school in a new community, I created this project to connect with other mothers and children and to create opportunities for expression, participation and exchange. Workshops were set up as one on one, group participation and community participation.

This installation can be read in two parts:

1. Processes of Development: The stories and conversations, shared and exchanged. In this work I have illustrated the process as ‘sediment’ - the stuff that settles on the bottom of the ocean. While the process is rarely seen as beautiful or important, it is however the very work that makes connections; the stories told, the tears and laughter. Invisible entities that are left to dissolve into the atmosphere, float along with the breeze or sink to the bottom of the ocean long after the work is complete.

2. Final Product: The result; the object; the fish piñata. A symbol of motherhood, children, life, creativity, beauty, fun, resilience, community and friendship.

Thank you to my family, friends and the mothers and students of Montville and the Blackall Range.

 photograph by Candice Herne

The above image and the following images are of the bottom of the fish sea 'sediment'. Have your Say. Viewers were asked to write their thoughts on Motherhood and throw them in the sea.

 photograph by Candice Herne

 photograph by Candice Herne

 photograph by Candice Herne

photograph by Candice Herne

photograph by Candice Herne

From the Cocoon

A collaboration by Candice Herne and her son Rhody Nash. Mono printing techniques using paint onto cut out butterfly cards.

Butterflies are symbols of freedom and beauty. From the cocoon or from the womb. The birth of life is an awakening. Children create opportunity for elders to learn and connect in a new world with a sense of freedom and wonder. Representing a second chance at seeing, feeling and experiencing.

Initiated by Rhody, the butterfly card project is a creative way to connect as mother and son. The project is exhibited in galleries, markets and festivals in Brisbane and the Sunshine Coast.

Life after death, is the butterfly. Candice Herne

Opening night celebration

photograph by Rachael Lee

Opening night from left to right: artist Chrys Zantis, Seal Chong Wah (Burlesque dancer) who performed a saucy dance on the night. Artist Katrina Stirling (with glass in hand), artist Candice Herne. Bottom right: Guest Speaker artist Anita West who shared her experience of being being both mother and artist and artist Sandra Landolt and her daughter Luca Milena.

photograph by Rachael Lee

Mums and Bubs workshop with Candice Herne

photographs by Candice Herne

'Mamas in the hood' held a special screening event of the film Who Does She Think She Is? It also played continuously for the entire month. Small groups came in to watch the film.

Collaboration, Candice Herne, Sandra Landolt, Katrina Stirling and Chrys Zantis, self help book sculpture

photographs by Candice Herne

I hope you all have enjoyed the journey as much as I have. See you soon. Candyxx

Essay by Helen Sturgess (MVA) - for Mamas in the hood, Pine Rivers Art Gallery Queensland Australia, Oct 5th - Nov 5th, 2011

Throughout the history of art, I would hazard a guess, artists-who-are-mothers have struggled with ambivalent feelings, both their own and those of the society in which they live, regarding their combination of these two disparate roles. Most notably disparate in that ‘serious’ artistic practice is traditionally seen as requiring a ferocious single point of concentration … the artist secluded in his lonely garret … whereas the demands of mothering afford a very different kind of time, a patchwork of moments. The artist/mother must develop what NZ installation artist Frances Joseph has aptly termed a ‘language of interruption’.

As we learn and develop through our experiences, it’s not surprising that for many artist/mothers aspects of their mothering, to a greater or lesser extent, find their way into their artwork. This can result from conscious decision – for example Mierle Laderman Ukeles, having been told in the late 1960s by her art school mentor that her pregnancy would naturally preclude a career as an artist, set out to use her maternal work as the basis for her artistic practice. It can also happen more subtly, subversively – as playground swings, for example, have insinuated their way into my own work, despite my initial desire to keep ‘mothering’ and ‘art’ separate. (In the words of poet Adrienne Rich, when asked why she hadn’t written poetry about her children, “poetry was where I lived as no-one’s mother, where I existed as myself.”)

Ukeles, along with her contemporary Mary Kelly (with her Post-Partum Document), was fighting an uphill battle, and one that is still being waged. ‘Taking time out’ to bear and nurture children precludes many women from serious consideration as artists, and from access to the limited assistance available to ‘emerging’ artists here in Australia and elsewhere.

However, in the current theoretical climate, as art becomes increasingly understood as a catalytic element in human relations, the primacy, the ‘urgency’ of the mother/child relationship surely renders it not only a relevant, but an essential subject for artistic investigation.

In this exhibition four artists explore the intersections between these two aspects of their own lives. In doing so, whilst investigating the myriad and varied ways in which individual mothers experience this overlap, they don’t shy away from the dark side of these stories, the stresses and strains, resentments and exhaustions, pushes and pulls that often characterise the life of the mother. Landolt’s ‘moving objects’, although at initial glance quirky and fun, can also appear both strangely stoic and, in their repeated jerky movements, disturbingly depersonalised, reminiscent of the human mind and body responding to intolerable stress. They counterbalance the stillness of Stirling’s movingly elegiac bundles, each unwrapped and worked upon, stitched, as if in an attempt to ‘mend’ a sad event. Meanwhile Herne’s eclectic collaborative work, complete with fish piñatas, again seems at first glance relatively naïve and playful, bringing to mind the joy and energy of children’s parties; yet the implicit violence, resulting in the splitting open of these strong yet fragile vessels, adds a layer of tension and fear beneath the surface of the work, a tension heightened further by Zantis’ obsessively intricate, sexually suggestive, slightly disturbing three-dimensional collages in cloying baby pink.

Helen Sturgess, MVA (Sculpture, Performance and Installation)

Helen's master thesis: Towards a Language of Interruption: an attempt to articulate and document the experience of being both a mother and an artist . Published as a book and can be bought here.


Helen Sturgess - Wall (II) 2007- video installation

This looped video projected against a white wall might initially appear to be a repetition of one crash of the swing. Prolonged viewing, however, reveals a subtle chronological narrative. The swing hangs motionless, a shadow alone suggesting the proximity of an otherwise indiscernible wall. Suddenly the swing crashes against this wall, its impact violently demonstrating the wall's physicality and limiting presence. As one crash follows another the wall becomes subtly more tangible, as the swing's rubber seat marks it, creating a pattern of abuse. Eventually the swing dissolves, leaving only the marks it has made on the wall. These marks then also disappear. After some time the swing and pristine wall reappear, and the process begins again.