Paintings

Great Mother

Mothership. Oil on canvas This was a vision I had, as my son calls on me less as an earthly mother, I became massive and floated up, like a giant mothership of cosmic maternal presence, but still totally psychically connected by these arms. She is a strange body, a vessel, a landscape and a hovering cosmic structure. Make It Rain, Baby. Oil on canvas The point of creation, primeval soup where cells divide and bodies form – babies and figures float through a cosmic space that also resembles a giant cell, womb or placenta. This speaks to the need of humans to procreate and connect with each other. Hands and arms reach out to hold, touch, release and catch them. Motherhood is no longer located within one body. It becomes an entire abundant atmosphere. The babies seem to be falling, floating, arriving into existence. Family Tree. Oil on sewn linen and canvas This painting is also separate components, and I’ve sewn bits of canvas together. I wanted to ground the cosmic imagery by introducing natural forms: trees, creatures etc. The tree becomes both a family tree and a body. It contains womb-like forms, sacs and unborn children. It can be read as a birth canal, an ancestral structure or a bridge between the earthly and the cosmic. At it’s base are male and female figures, but they are no longer simply Adam and Eve in the traditional sense. They are part of a larger organism. Human bodies, hands, stars, roots and branches begin to merge. Rather than humanity standing apart from nature and being given dominion over it, the figures are embedded within it. The paintings reveal thoughts, but they are also physical objects and bodily encounters. They allow me to enter an imaginal space in which familiar cultural structures can be dismantled and rebuilt. The work asks where power lies, who has access to knowledge, what we inherit from our origin stories, and whether those stories can be rearranged. It also asks what needs to be protected: the natural world, the body, sexuality, fertility, memory, the maternal, or perhaps our capacity to imagine things differently. I would love to see these large paintings installed in a fertility clinic, maternity unit or hospital, where they could exist alongside the actual mysteries of conception, birth, loss and bodily transformation.