Latest news with #Mothering
Indian Express
11-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Indian Express
New definitions of mothering in powerful new Pune exhibition
The latest exhibition at Vida Heydari Contemporary art gallery in Koregaon Park is 'Mothering' – but there is none of the quintessential mother-and-child works on display. Instead, among the first images one sees are Shivangi Ladha's 'Rise' and 'Care'. These are expressions of an Indian artist who is, now, based in London. Her distance from the familiarity of her home and motherland emerges as a 'tension between isolation and collective strength'. This is, especially, true for 'Care', where women figures stand upright, hands stretched overhead, like so many trees in a community forest. 'Her practice also draws from her own experiences as an immigrant—finding sustenance and protection within circles of fellow artists, who stand in as guardians to one another,' says the official statement from the gallery. 'Mothering', which will be on view till September 5, comprises, besides Ladha, the works of Aravani Art Project, a Bengaluru-based collective space for people from the transgender community, Chathuri Nissansala, a multidisciplinary artist based in Sri Lanka, Liactuallee, a queer visual artist from Mumbai who creates powerful soft sculptures using, as the exhibition shows, material such as acrylic yarn and polyfill, and Roghayeh Najdi, whose works deep dive into the realities of women in her homeland, Iran. The captivating work, 'Other Ways to Hold' by Aravani Art Project depicts four figures who appear to be arranged for a comfortable family photo. Another shows a transgender with a kitten. Both images redefine the concepts of family and expand the embrace of mothering. Liactuallee's series of sculptures capture an urge to break straitjackets and expand the self in every which way. For Nissansala, who has documented a performance that they carried out in Sri Lanka, 'mothering is an act of quiet, transformative reclamation. They/She performs with discarded and found objects transforming them into embroidered deities—an act of queer ancestral resurrection through nurturing and ritual. This tender gaze repairs grief through gentle reclamation, honoring the lives of queer Sri Lankans while resisting erasure'. Najdi presents the women in her works like undeveloped negatives from the days before digital photography. Men, who are hostile figures, make up the background. Works like 'Hear Your Voice In The Silence' that was created this year, shows women supporting and holding up one another. The defiant flowers in the paintings come across as resistance, hope and self-care, like individual blooms put together as a powerful whole. Dipanita Nath is interested in the climate crisis and sustainability. She has written extensively on social trends, heritage, theatre and startups. She has worked with major news organizations such as Hindustan Times, The Times of India and Mint. ... Read More
Yahoo
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Breast pumps, babygrows and unfinished drinks: the stunning parenting paintings every mother should see
Ten years ago, when the Scottish painter Caroline Walker was in her early30s, she noticed something happening to her artist friends who were having babies. 'They were suddenly taken less seriously,' she says. At the time, she didn't have children of her own, and she was sure that if she ever did, her life as a parent would remain separate from her art. 'It still felt hard enough to be taken seriously as a woman artist,' she says, 'without adding in this other thing, let alone making it the subject of your work.' She smiles wryly and raises her eyebrows. We're speaking ahead of her largest museum show to date – an exhibition at the Hepworth Wakefield titled Mothering. Now 43, Walker has built a dazzlingly successful career as a figurative painter, and is the mother of two small children. Ever since she was a student, first at Glasgow School of Art, then at the Royal College of Art in London, from where she graduated in 2009, she's been closely observing women. Rendered on intimate panels and breathtakingly big cinematic canvases, her subjects have ranged from bakers and beauticians to tailors and housekeepers – and, lately, the constellation of mostly female workers providing support during childbirth and early-years care. Walker began painting all-things parenthood when she became a mother for the first time in 2019. She was already in touch with London's University College Hospital about the prospect of doing a residency before she got pregnant, and during her appointments there she decided to focus on the maternity wing. The paintings in the Birth Reflections series are awash with cobalt blue – medical scrubs, disposable gloves and hairnets – yet within the coolly sterile setting is a warm sense of dedication. It's there on a sonographer's face, strained as she picks out details from a grainy black-and-white image on a screen, and in a midwife's fingertips, softly pressing a stethoscope to a tiny baby's chest. It's there in the anxious glance across the operating theatre of a mother newly stitched up after a caesarean section, and in the concentrated poses of the eight uniformed strangers attending to her and her baby. I didn't anticipate that I would be repeatedly mining my children for subject matter 'I was still slightly reticent about how it was going to be received,' Walker says of this newfound interest. 'That it would be seen as less interesting or a bit of a cliche: 'Oh, she had a baby and now she's going to make a load of paintings about that.' But I tried not to limit myself, just to let things develop, and now it seems very understandable to me that artists would respond to this life event through their work because it's such a big shift in identity and daily life.' Birth Reflections is one of four series included in the show. Another, Lisa , explores what happens when a new mother brings a baby home. Following her sister-in-law over four months, starting when she's heavily pregnant, these knowing paintings show what Walker describes as 'a more subjective view on the transition into motherhood and the domestic space in which so much of this time is spent'. Padding around in pyjamas; groggily breastfeeding in bed in the middle of the night; lounging on the sofa while the baby sleeps on you, vacantly watching television in the middle of the day. Meanwhile, Walker's work has become more autobiographical. The earliest painting on display features her daughter, Daphne, as a toddler, glimpsed through the window of the family's old flat in London in 2021. 'It was the first time I'd painted her, and the first time I'd used my own life as a direct subject. It was supposed to be for sale, but I felt I had to hang on to it.' She laughs. 'I didn't anticipate then that I would be repeatedly mining my children for subject matter.' Daphne, who's now five and apparently delights in seeing herself in paint, appears throughout the exhibition. We see her bobbing about in a swimming lesson with yellow armbands and froggy legs, and sitting at the kitchen table with Walker's mother, Janet, and a cuddly hermit crab. And playing around at nursery, initially in London and more recently in Scotland, where Walker and her family have been living since summer 2022. The title of the show is borrowed from something a member of staff at Little Bugs, an outdoor nursery, said about 'mothering' being part of their training. 'A lot of the time, I've been looking in on a subject as an outsider,' says Walker, who begins by spending time with women and photographing their days. Being behind the camera at her daughter's nursery was different: 'I was paying for another woman to look after my child, so that I could make my work, which in this case was portraying that woman looking after my child. There was a complicated relationship of financial exchange going on that made me think about how we value different forms of labour.' Throughout her career, Walker has taken small acts of unseen and under-appreciated work – plumping pillowcases, scrubbing sinks, buffing and shaping nails – and depicted them in oil paint on an epic scale traditionally reserved for history paintings. She does so by paying attention to paraphernalia as much as people. In this show's case, sterilised plastic bottles and breast pumps, half-finished drinks collecting on a table, fresh flowers still in their paper packaging, babygrows sprouting from a wardrobe like weeds. Modern motherhood with its all-consuming clutter. 'When I was at home with Daphne, I remember looking around the house and finding it really claustrophobic, just the stuff everywhere,' she says. 'There was condensation continuously running down the walls from all these things drying because we suddenly had so much washing.' She decided that this was what being a new mother looked like, and that she wanted to make paintings of it. 'Because it is a mess, but it's also visually interesting. It tells a story, and it's very specific to that moment.' A rare self-portrait shows Walker with her then six-week-old son, Laurie. She was about to put him down in his cot when she paused in front of a mirror and asked her husband to take a photograph of the two of them. Walker's reflection meets us with an exhausted gaze. 'I was so tired, and not having the best time, and it felt interminable.' She drifts off and smiles. 'Now every time I look at that painting it takes me back to what it felt like to hold this tiny little body and have these tiny little hands on my shoulder.' Walker and her family live in a converted farmstead on the fringes of Dunfermline, half an hour from Edinburgh, surrounded by fields of bleating lambs. Her parents are a 10-minute drive away, in the house where she grew up; she doesn't come from an artistic family, but she liked to draw from an early age, mostly women and the world around them. She has a small studio at home, and a larger one is in the works. 'It's a different setup to living in London, of course, but actually workwise it's pretty good,' she says. 'The way I work is different now. It's bitty, but there are lots of bits, and overall I probably end up with the same amount of time I had before, or I use my time better.' Will mothering still be her subject in a decade's time? 'I suppose these early years are so intense that it's natural they would bubble up into the work, but my relationship with my children and the intensity of my involvement will obviously change,' she says. For now, though, being a mother and an artist are one and the same. 'My work and my life have become completely entwined.' • Caroline Walker: Mothering is at Hepworth Wakefield from 17 May to 27 October, and at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester from 22 November to 10 May 2026. The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated monograph of the same title, to be published by Lund Humphries in September.
The Guardian
27-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Theory of Everything by Yumna Kassab review – this kaleidoscopic experiment is a delight
How do you find meaning in a novel that rejects it so thoroughly? The publisher's blurb for The Theory of Everything, Yumna Kassab's new work, describes it as many things, among them 'a rant, a manifesto … a dramatisation of actual events, a horror-scape … five mini-novels or else five post-novels … an agreement, a wink'. In perhaps her most ambitious work to date, all of these things could be true. While Kassab, the inaugural Parramatta laureate in literature, has become known for her fragmented, polyphonic style, here she breaks the mould even further, removing the narrative supports of her earlier works Politica and The Lovers and taking us out of the familiar forms of the novel, novella, short story, even vignette, into something – indescribably – else. Divided into five parts (or 'mini-novels', as the blurb suggests), The Theory of Everything is far from a comfort read. There is no opportunity to lose yourself in a narrative – and if, for a moment, there seems to be, it's snatched away almost immediately. The novel opens with a powerfully violent allegory that sees 'the war of the century' play out in a sports stadium, but it immediately gives way to another, more fragmented form. The overall impression is less novel than surrealist painting, provoking strong, even contradictory reactions, and changing shape as you watch. It might be a love story worn down by the pressures of elite sports and structural racism, then a diatribe about the novel itself; a lengthy philosophical oration on form and function. Later, it morphs into a monologue which might be read as society breaking down, or alternatively a society finally finding the courage to revolt. Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning All the interpretations might be simultaneously true. All might be totally incorrect. Kassab has posed a mighty challenge to her readers. The Theory of Everything revolts against a toothless, performative feminism, hypocritical and racist ideologies that embolden the status quo, and a world unwilling to change. Kassab's critiques are wide reaching, covering disparities in education, maternal health care, economic potential and social acceptance. The women in this book, frequently unnamed or spoken of in general terms, are trying to get back to their children, or staying strong for their families. They are women who are sick of being brutalised for playing nice. The novel's creative challenges are a delight, stirring up the possibilities of what novels might be and do. At her best, Kassab writes burning little glimpses of our fractured global existence. In all but the final section of the novel, beautifully rendered scenes gleam through the wreckage of a world that is tearing itself apart. In one of these vignettes, Mothering (for Mellie), a mother changes her baby's nappy while a pig-headed security guard attempts to remove her from the store. In The Friends (for Gabrielle), a man living on the brink of poverty games the system in order to keep feeding his only companions – the birds at his window. In contrast, the denser monologues feel weighty, almost exhausting to read. She, a subsection of the novel's second part, Gender, is oppressively self-reflexive, pre-empting, perhaps, any criticisms of the novel's form. Kassab (as She) writes: 'Just because it's called a novel doesn't mean it's a novel. Publishers are notorious for trying to pass off non-novels as novels, likely for commercial reasons but perhaps there's an element of the experiment, that the label of the novel should not be so narrow.' It might be easier to grasp The Theory of Everything's central premise if the experiment were slightly more contained, but that's clearly not the point. And honestly, it's a delight to see a writer willing to push the boundaries so far, and to be so unconcerned with palatability. There are three characters in particular that stand out as more fully drawn than the others, whose stories reveal the performance of belonging. Ibrahim, who appears in the novel's early parts, is an elite footballer who finds fame and wealth signing on to a major league in the west, but is forced to reckon with how much of his identity he's willing to sacrifice as his wife, his religion and his visits to his home country become easy fodder for racist media headlines. Lucille, a movie star who no longer uses her old name, Nour, experiences similar interrogations as she is asked repeatedly in interviews 'where [she stands] in relation to the cause'. Sign up to Saved for Later Catch up on the fun stuff with Guardian Australia's culture and lifestyle rundown of pop culture, trends and tips after newsletter promotion Jamal, the last of these three characters, best articulates the dilemma the three characters have in common: 'The price for the support and friendliness and community was that he hand over his life. In return for his inclusion, he was to nod when told, speak when ordered, to voice the opinions he had been taught. In short, his life was to be an echo of their life.' Here, Kassab reveals how tenuous the protection of success and celebrity are, how reliant they are on the performer playing along. In this bold, electrifying experiment, Yumna Kassab refuses to perform. The Theory of Everything by Yumna Kassab is out through Ultimo Press ($34.99)
