MOTHER (8 May – 1 June 2025) is a group exhibition at DRAW Space, Sydney, exploring motherhood as a lived experience shaped by shifting identities, labour, and creative negotiation. Bringing together expanded drawing practices—including works on paper, painting, performance, photography, and hybrid forms—the exhibition examines the complexities of maternal subjectivity and its representation in contemporary art.

Motherhood is often framed through restrictive social ideologies, either idealised or dismissed as unimportant or unsuitable for public display. MOTHER challenges these representations, positioning the domestic sphere and caregiving as sites of experimentation, resilience, and transformation. The works engage with tensions between care and autonomy, creation and constraint, visibility and erasure.

More than a private, natural, or biological role, mothering is a dynamic, evolving experience shaped by relationships, environments, and broader social forces. The exhibition foregrounds artworks that acknowledge the contradictions, struggles, and flux inherent in diverse mothering experiences. Through process-driven practices, participating artists reflect on how motherhood shapes identity, creative production, and the spaces in which it unfolds.

Artists:

• Zoe Freney (co-curator) – SA

• Fran Callen – SA

• Sanné Mestrom – NSW

• Madeline McGregor – NSW

• Harriet Body – ACT

• Katy B Plummer – NSW

• Ali Noble – NSW

• Anna Louise Richardson – WA

• Jingwei Bu – SA

• Lottie Emma – SA

• Alexia Fisher – NSW

• Atong Atem – VIC

• Megan Lyons – SA/NSW