The Mother
The Mother is a series of portraits exploring the mother figure as a social construct that is not fixed, but changing with the cultural values and political forces of the time.
Images of the mother figure have been present in our culture in a variety of forms for a long time, the most popular of which have always been idealised. This series embodies some of our traditional, mythical and modern (visual) associations of her and through the mother's unwavering gaze in these portraits, the viewer is encouraged to think twice about their own assumptions. By making each of the portraits formally identical, I aim to suggest that our idea of the mother figure is a construction. I have removed her from any context by which she could be weighed up (eg socio-economic status, work, her children) to disallow the viewer to make any oversimplified conclusions about her and her identity.
By hanging these large portraits (1m by 1.6m) so that the viewer needs to look up at them to meet their gaze, I want to evoke a feeling of matriarchal power, but wish to leave any inference about what this means ambiguous.
The Mother is a series of portraits exploring the mother figure as a social construct that is not fixed, but changing with the cultural values and political forces of the time.
Images of the mother figure have been present in our culture in a variety of forms for a long time, the most popular of which have always been idealised. This series embodies some of our traditional, mythical and modern (visual) associations of her and through the mother's unwavering gaze in these portraits, the viewer is encouraged to think twice about their own assumptions. By making each of the portraits formally identical, I aim to suggest that our idea of the mother figure is a construction. I have removed her from any context by which she could be weighed up (eg socio-economic status, work, her children) to disallow the viewer to make any oversimplified conclusions about her and her identity.
By hanging these large portraits (1m by 1.6m) so that the viewer needs to look up at them to meet their gaze, I want to evoke a feeling of matriarchal power, but wish to leave any inference about what this means ambiguous.
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