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
Meet the artists
Zoe Freeney
BIO: Zoe Freney is an artist, writer, and academic living on Kaurna and Peramangk Country in Adelaide, South Australia. Her work explores experiences of mothering and relational encounters. Zoe is Coordinator of BVA and BVA (Honours) at Adelaide Central School of Art, where she also teaches Art History & Theory. She holds a PhD from the Australian National University, where her practice-led research focused on representations of mothers and mothering, using hybrid methodologies shaped by mess and interruption. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and shortlisted for a number of Australian art prizes.
Zoe Freney
Z and A on the couch, 2025, pastel on primed paper, 190 × 115 cm. Photo: Sam Roberts. Courtesy of the artist.
Anna Louise Richardson
These two works are part of a body of works for the 2024 TILT commission at Goolugatup Heathcote. SHELTER is a coming together of new artworks by partners in life and sometimes work, Richardson and Abdullah. These coalescing bodies of works collage impressions, fleeting though distinctive, of some of Western Australia’s least glamorous, though closest-to-home birdlife - through the lenses of the artists’ lived and imaginative suburban and rural experiences of place.
The humble Kanamit (in Noongar), or Welcome Swallow, earned its English name – and status as the bird most tattooed on human flesh - from sailors, drunk with relief at the sight of these red-faced, agile flyers - so often the first harbingers of land ahoy. Seafarers’ romanticism aside, these creatures are today widely resented for plaguing our infrastructure with their notoriously disease-ridden refuges – and marking their territories thick with droppings.
For a young Anna Louise Richardson, they were avian housemates whose cup-like cocoons of dried mud would adorn the eaves of her home on the family farm in the outskirts of Perth. The earthen armature of these nests so quaintly fitted with materials borrowed from the human and natural worlds the species readily move between - hair, fabric, stuffing, grass, feathers, fur - were accessible sources of wonder for Richardson and her sister as they watched generations of families hatch, grow and discover their dynamic language of flight. Reimagining, or re-seeing, these commonplace native, now invasive, fauna through the artists’ youthful eyes - and through the wide eyes of Richardson and Abdullah’s own children - enables a refreshing appreciation of their beauty and ingenuity.
Richardson’s observations of Welcome Swallows are writ large through the gallery: a series of their nimble-winged and beguiling airborne formations are depicted in charcoal on cement fibreboard. Playfully blown up in scale, these otherwise photographic sketches have been cut out as to occupy the walls free-of-frame. These are eavesdropped upon by a smaller suite of graphite portraits on paper describing tender familial moments. It’s as if Richardson has absorbed an innate knowing of the swallow’s preening and pruning rituals in her years living as their neighbour, such is the prowess of her linework. One can almost sense the slick softness of their feathers upon skin.
Words by Kate Alida Mullen
BIO: Anna Louise Richardson is based on Bindjareb Noongar country in WA. Her drawing-based practice explores themes of family, intergenerational exchange, parenthood and connection to place. Often using charcoal and graphite with cement fibreboard, Richardson combines realism with flattened perspectives, cut-outs, and shifts in scale to heighten emotional impact. Raised on a multigenerational cattle farm, she often draws from personal experience, using animals, landscapes, and familiar objects as metaphors for complex emotional and existential ideas. Her work offers an intimate view of rural life and human-animal relationships. A Curtin University graduate (2013), Richardson works as both an artist and curator. Recent projects include the 2024 TILT commission at Goolugatup Heathcote with Abdul-Rahman Abdullah, and her solo show The Good, touring nationally through 2026. She was the inaugural winner of the 2023 Girra Art Prize and a 2020 Ramsay Art Prize finalist.
Anna Louise Richardson
Swallows II, 2024, graphite on paper, 56x76cm (framed 63x82.5x4cm), $3500