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.
Join the artists and DRAW Space team to celebrate the opening of MOTHER, 6-8pm Thursday 8 May.
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:
Click image above to download pdf copy of Room Sheet and Exhibition Essay by Zoe Freney.
Atong Atem – VIC
Harriet Body – ACT
Jingwei Bu – SA
Nyunmiti Burton – SA
Fran Callen – SA
Lottie Emma – SA
Alexia Fisher – NSW
Zoe Freney (co-curator) – SA
Megan Lyons – SA
Madeline McGregor – NSW
Sanné Mestrom – NSW
Ali Noble – NSW
Katy B Plummer – NSW
Anna Louise Richardson – WA
Meet the artists
Atong Atem
Atong Atem is an Ethiopian born, South Sudanese artist and writer living in Narrm/ Melbourne. Atem’s work explores the inherent intimacy of portraiture, interrogating photography as a framework for looking at the world and positioning people in it. Atem references the works of 20th century African studio photographers Malick Sidibe, Philip Kwame Apagya and Seydou Keita to create a visual representation of a relationship to culture. She works primarily with photography, video and textiles to explore migrant narratives and postcolonial practices in the African diaspora, and the exploration of home and identity through portraiture. Atem has exhibited her work across Australia and internationally, including the Tate Modern, the National Maritime Museum of the Netherlands, and the National Gallery of Victoria. Her work is held in numerous collections including the National Gallery of Victoria, the National Portrait Gallery and the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
Exhibition statement
Atong Atem's series Dust draws on the artist’s experience of motherhood, exploring the intersections of birth, death, and ritual. Exploring the role of Dinka women as custodians to the earth, this series draws parallels between Dinka culture and traditional iconographies of western Christianity, evoking the Virgin Mary and the embodied intensity of carrying life while contemplating mortality.
Atong Atem
Dust #4, 2023, Ilford smooth pearl print, 150 × 100 cm, Edition 1 of 3 + 2 AP. Courtesy of the artist and MARS Gallery.
Harriet Body
Harriet Body is an artist based in Canberra (Ngunnawal and Ngambri country), originally from Berry Springs, NT (Kungarakan country). Her practice centres on care, slowness, and community. Working across textiles, ceramics, and installation, she embraces repetitive, meditative processes to explore growth and impermanence. Body’s socially engaged projects create collaborative spaces of making, increasingly informed by her experience of motherhood. Body holds an MFA (Research) and a BFA (First Class Honours) from UNSW Art & Design. She has received major funding from Create NSW (2015, 2018, 2021), was a finalist in the 2019 NSW Emerging Visual Arts Fellowship, and won the Hazelhurst Art on Paper Prize in 2017. She also works in public programming at the National Gallery of Australia, embedding care and accessibility into her broader arts practice.
Exhibition statement:
Harriet Body has recently been creating work with her two children, Ted (6) and Ralf (18 months) under the collective title ‘Did you know the sun is just another star?’ both a question and a fact that Ted proclaimed to Harriet one day on his return from daycare.
“To Ted, this piece of information seemed just another idea in a mountain of ideas that avalanche on him daily. As we went about our afternoon, me in orbit around him with the routine of dinner; bath time; bedtime, I had the thought: Just another son.”
The work, ‘Sonlight’ is a lamp, a domestic sun, created by Harriet, Ted, and Ralf.
Harriet Body with her children, Ted and Ralf
Sonlight, 2025, Ceramic, wire, lightbulb, eucalyptus-dyed thread, 35 × 30 × 5 cm
Jingwei Bu
Jingwei Bu’s practice explores the intersection of motherhood, identity, and material transformation. As both artist and mother, she investigates how caregiving and creative labour converge in everyday life. Working with found and domestic materials—such as packaging, fabric remnants, and household debris—Bu transforms the overlooked into poetic, playful forms that hold the trace of lived experience. Her process is slow and performative, often grounded in repetitive gestures and embodied interaction with materials. The body—its movements, labour, and proximity to care—is central to her work. Rather than separating art from the domestic, Bu embraces their entanglement, revealing the quiet inventiveness embedded in daily life.
Exhibition statement:
The Hairy Tales is a series of drawings exploring impermanence, identity, and transformation through delicate, swirling lines inspired by the everyday gesture of hair circling a shower drain. These marks echo cycles of growth, loss, and renewal—resonating with the shifting nature of motherhood and the evolving self. By preserving something fleeting, the work finds quiet beauty in overlooked moments. Playful yet reflective, it invites us to see the traces of daily life as meaningful, embodied acts of care and change.
Jingwei Bu, The Hairy Tales #1, 2018, Pen drawing on tracing paper, 120 × 60 cm. Courtesy the artist.
Nyunmiti Burton
Nyunmiti Burton is a leading artist from Amata in the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands of the Southern Desert region. A respected community leader, Nyunmiti has served as a director of the APY Council and NPY Women’s Council and is a founding director of the APY Art Centre Collective. Through her art and advocacy, she honours the role of senior women as protectors and teachers, ensuring that Anangu women stay strong, connected, and safe, helping the next generations to fly.
Exhibition statement:
My mother’s name was Tinimai. She had a similar face to me but lovely long white hair. She taught me my culture and was the first to teach me the Seven Sisters story. I clearly remember my mother dancing this Tjukurpa (ancestral story) with other important women from Ernabella. The men would sing as the women danced. I remember as a young woman watching my father singing as my mother danced. The Seven Sisters story has always been important for Anangu women and it is more important today than ever before. It is a story that celebrates women’s leadership – as cultural leaders, family leaders, older sisters, mothers. I am proud of my leadership role. This is very serious work.
Nyunmiti Burton
Untitled, 2025, ink on paper, 100 x 70 cm. Courtesy the artist and APY gallery.
Fran Callen
Fran Callen lives and works on Kaurna land (Adelaide). She completed Honours in Visual Arts at the University of South Australia in 2005 and was awarded the 2023 Ruth Tuck Scholarship to study in Florence. Since 2007, she has exhibited widely and taught at Adelaide College of the Arts and UniSA. Her practice centres on domestic life, with unstretched canvas ‘tablecloths’ laid on her kitchen table becoming sites of collaborative, layered mark-making. These palimpsests evolve through daily routines and her children’s input, incorporating scientific illustration, local knowledge, and observations of the natural world. Recent iterations use negative space to form cast plaster still lifes. Callen was Highly Commended in the 2022 Waterhouse and Heysen Prizes and included in Neoterica (Adelaide Festival, 2024). Her climate-focused work Just Add Water (2019–21) responded to time spent on Adnyamathanha Country. She is currently collaborating with hydrologist Dr Margaret Shanafield on a SALA 2025 project exploring the effect of climate change on groundwater recharge.
Exhibition statement:
Callen's work ‘Heave’ explores the labour and terrifying love of motherhood, using domestic routines and recycled materials to record the flux of daily life and the geological metaphors of time.
Fran Callen, with Acacia (11) and Zakki (9)
Heave, 2024
Components: Conglomerate (canvas); Overburden (plaster objects on tabletop); Erosion (plaster objects on large shelf); Abrasion (plaster objects on small shelf); Striation (plaster objects on tiny shelf); Baulk, Fault, Fold (paint skins), Graphite, gesso, coloured pencil, biro, tea, coffee, wine, eucalyptus sap, ash (campfire/bushfire), turmeric, dirt, charcoal, graphite dust, watercolour, acrylic, oils, lapis lazuli, glitter, gold leaf, burnt marshmallows, dishwater, and eggshells. Works are made on cast plaster, soft plastic recycling, watercolour canvas, and unstretched paint-skin ‘tablecloths’. Sizes variable. Includes drawings by Acacia and Zakki.
Shelves by Caren Elliss. Pigments crushed by Zakki.
Photos: Sam Roberts and Rosina Possingham
Commissioned for Neoterica 2024, curated by Ray Harris.
Lottie Emma
Lottie Emma is a South Australian contemporary textiles artist living and working on Ngarrindjeri/Ramindjeri land, on the Fleurieu Peninsula. Her practice combines embroidery, repurposed fabrics, and soft sculpture, weaving together personal narrative and material experimentation. Lottie’s work is shaped by both fast and slow-paced processes, reflecting the unpredictability of daily life and her experience as a mother to a special needs child. Themes of disempowerment, resilience, tenderness, and hope recur throughout her practice, often expressed through tactile, layered forms that invite close attention. With a background in fashion design and wearable art, Lottie studied at TAFE SA and the University of Tasmania. She has exhibited widely across South Australia in galleries, festivals, and community-led initiatives. In 2025, she presented a solo exhibition titled Cloudy with a Chance of Mum Storms at Post Office Projects, developed through Country Arts SA’s Nebula program and supported by a Guildhouse mentorship with fellow textile artist Kasia Tons.
Exhibition statement:
Emma’s tactile textile works draw on the rhythms of domestic life and the lived experience of mothering a child with special needs, expressing resilience, tenderness, and the emotional complexity of care.
Lottie Emma
Mother Shield Forever and Ever, 2025, repurposed stretch synthetic, fairy floss fill and fringing, cotton thread, brass hooks. Dimensions variable.
Alexia Fisher
Alexia Fisher is a conceptual artist who works with symbols and metaphors to engage with her lived experiences. Fisher’s work explores themes of censorship; whether imposed by society, her diasporic upbringing, or the self. Through a practice of embodiment, she uses materials to fuse and process her psychology. Crafting materials without tools, she imparts the physical and emotional tension carried in her body—expelling restricted topics through the language of making. Text is scratched into concrete surfaces, ephemeral drawings on the wall are washed over with paint, and bodily impressions are left from re-enactments in clay. A multimodal artist, Fisher delves into subject and research before stepping into the studio, a space of performative rituals and curation. She maintains a digital register alongside each body of work, capturing the ephemeral and collating her process. Formally diverse, her works communicate diametric qualities—fragility and strength, care and brutality, the temporal and permanent—using material as both tangible and ideological expression.
Exhibition statement:
In her studio, a space for ritual and creation, Alexia Fisher shapes her materials without tools to impart in them the physical and emotional tension carried in her body. This way she explores contradictory states of fragility and strength, care and brutality, the temporal and permanent.
In Self Portrait (Mother, Son, Foetus), these dualities are embodied through the deconstruction of the chair – a symbol of support, comfort and silent protest. The delicate beginnings of clay and cotton are transformed through a negotiation of material, mirroring the protective and expressive roles of motherhood.
Alexia Fisher
Self Portrait (Mother, Son, Foetus), 2025, mid-fire clay, bleach on cotton, 45 × 19 × 16 cm (Son — pictured); full work includes Mother and Foetus. Courtesy the artist.
Zoe Freney
Zoe Freney is an artist, writer, and academic living on Kaurna and Peramangk Country in Adelaide, South Australia. Her practice explores the complexities of mothering and relational experience, often engaging with embodied processes, domestic labour, and care. Working primarily in painting and drawing, she brings a feminist lens to representations of motherhood, prioritising personal narrative, intimacy, and the politics of visibility. 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. Zoe is Coordinator of the BVA and BVA (Honours) programs at Adelaide Central School of Art, where she also teaches Art History and Theory. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, and she has been shortlisted for a number of Australian art prizes. Zoe is co-curator of MOTHER, an exhibition exploring maternal subjectivity, care, and creative labour at DRAW Space.
Exhibition statement:
Freney's work investigates contemporary representations of motherhood, intertwining personal experiences with broader cultural narratives to explore the complexities of maternal identity.
Zoe Freney
Z and A on the couch, 2025, pastel on primed paper, 190 × 115 cm. Photo: Sam Roberts. Courtesy of the artist.
Megan Lyons
Megan Lyons was born in Amata on the APY Lands and grew up there with her family. In 2012, she relocated to Adelaide, where she is now raising her young family. Megan began painting at the Collective Art Centre Adelaide in 2023, where she works alongside family members and other Anangu artists. She comes from a long line of artists—her grandfather was the celebrated painter and ngangkari Tiger Palpatja, and her father, Sammy Lyons, was a respected senior man and artist at Tjala Arts in Amata. Her Big Mum, Kukika Adamson, also paints with her at the Collective Art Centre, and together they often collaborate on works. Megan paints Piltati, the story of the watersnake, and the Ngintaka Tjurkurpa, which comes from her father’s mother’s side—a powerful ancestral story from Angatja. Her paintings express a deep connection to family, culture, and Country, continuing a legacy of storytelling through art.
Exhibition statement:
Lyons' paintings, rooted in her Anangu heritage, explore ancestral stories and connections to Country, embodying the nurturing and guiding aspects of motherhood within her community.
Megan Lyons
Ngayuku Tjamuku Tjukurpa (My Grandfather's story), 2025, Ink on paper, 77 x 57 cm
Courtesy the artist and APY Galleries
Madeline McGregor
Madeline McGregor grew up in the South Island of New Zealand, and now lives on Dharawal Country, in the Royal National Park South of Sydney. McGregor’s practice is multi-disciplinary, with a focus on installation, sculpture and works on paper. Her work often explores elements of lived maternal experience, maternal heritage, and relationship to place, land, and the cycles of nature. Process, gesture and materiality are central to McGregor’s work.
McGregor transitioned from a career in textile design towards a focus on her art practice after the birth of her third child. She is currently completing a master’s of fine arts at the University of Sydney, under the supervision of Dr Sanné Mestrom. She holds a BDes (first class honours) from Massey University in Wellington and has been awarded the Massey University Masters Research Scholarship and the Fauvette Loureiro Travel Scholarship from the University of Sydney.
Exhibition statement:
McGregor's work explores matrescence as a radical, profound and permanent transition. Focussing on the lived experience of liminality in the time of mother-becoming, McGregor considers a vulnerabilityinherent during processes of re-forming and transformation, and explores the grounding potential of connecting to place and to the cycles of nature.
Madeline McGregor
Touchstone, 2025. Glass, steel, photographic print. Dimensions variable (plinth height 1100 mm; print approx. 900 × 700 mm). Courtesy of the artist.
Sanné Mestrom
Sanné Mestrom is an Australian conceptual artist whose sculptural practice reinterprets iconic modernist forms through contemporary materials and feminist perspectives. Her work engages with ideas of authorship, value, and cultural memory, often translating art historical references into playful, accessible public sculptures. Mestrom holds a PhD in Fine Art and a Graduate Certificate in Public Art from RMIT University. She has participated in international residencies in Seoul and Mexico City and was previously a studio artist at Gertrude Contemporary. Notable projects include Weeping Women (2014), a series of large-scale concrete fountains inspired by Picasso’s portraits, and Me & You (2019), which explores relational and bodily identity. Her work is held in major public collections, including the National Gallery of Australia and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. Mestrom is currently a Senior Lecturer in Sculpture at Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney, and is represented by Sullivan+Strumpf.
Exhibition statement:
‘Maternal Cosmos’ captures the intricate bond between my young son and me as a sole parent. We exist both intertwined and separate—a physical manifestation of matrescence, the profound transformation of becoming a mother. My journey into motherhood has compelled me to exist in multiple dimensions: looking inward at my own evolution while focusing outward on my child's needs; projecting forward to his future while being pulled backward into my own past. As he navigates each life stage, I find myself reliving my own childhood, seeing his experiences through the dual lens of parent and former-child. The entangled figures embody this complex reality—existing in present, past, and future, internal and external states all at once.
Sanné Mestrom
Maternal Cosmos, 2025, Plaster casts, 50cm x 35cm x 20cm (x2). Courtesy the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf.
Ali Noble
Ali Noble's practice spans installation, sculpture, collage, and video, engaging ideas of enchantment and ‘soft-contrariness.’ She uses textiles to bring fluidity and sensuality into hard-edged gallery spaces, treating them as materials of resistance and transformation. Her work prioritises colour, movement, and emotional resonance. Based on Gadigal/Wangal land in Sydney, Noble has a longstanding exhibition history in artist-run, institutional, and commercial spaces across Australia. A recent MFA graduate from Sydney College of the Arts, she was awarded both the Fauvette Loureiro Travel Scholarship and the David Harold Tribe Postgraduate Research Fellowship (Sculpture). In 2023, she held her MFA exhibition Nothing is Certain, said The Curtain. In 2025, Noble will present a solo exhibition Double Rainbow, A Return to Magic at Stanley Street Gallery and has been selected as a finalist for the Visual Arts Fellowship (Emerging) at Artspace, Sydney.
Exhibition statement:
Noble's textile installations act as 'soft contrarians' in hard spaces, using fabric's fluidity to challenge traditional power structures and evoke the transformative nature of motherhood.
Ali Noble
Auspicious Accumulations, 2025. Handsewn velvet and velveteen, custom frame, 45 x 35 cm
Katy B Plummer
Katy B Plummer is an interdisciplinary artist living and working on unceded lands intersecting Garigal, Darramurragal, and Gayamaygal Country (Sydney). Her practice spans video, performance, installation, and textiles, combining theatricality, folklore, feminist politics, and the aesthetics of high school drama to explore power, resistance, and historical memory. Plummer is deeply interested in ghosts, domestic rebellion, and the ways that poetic and witchy strategies can destabilise dominant historical narratives. Her work often stages speculative, allegorical worlds that blend historical references with the mythological, interrogating colonial legacies and patriarchal systems through acts of embodied storytelling. Plummer holds a BFA UNSW Art and Design, and an MFA from the School of Visual Art in New York. She has exhibited widely in Australia and internationally, including at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Carriageworks, Firstdraft, and regional centres such as MAMAlbury and Maitland Regional Art Gallery. Her practice proposes that history is a haunted house—and art, a means of haunting back.
Exhibition statement:
La Pietà, or, Explaining Disco to a Dead Hare (2014) stages an emotional elegy to a giant rabbit, where Plummer’s song, both a plea and a performance, becomes a vessel for reckoning with loss, the maternal voice, and the unanswered questions we sing into the void.
Katy B Plummer
La Pietà (Explaining Disco to a Dead Hare), 2014, single-channel HD video (5 min), dyed and stitched cotton velvet, dyed red wool, jute, dimensions variable, courtesy the artist.
Anna Louise Richardson
Anna Louise Richardson lives and works on Bindjareb Nyoongar Boodja in the Peel region of Western Australia. Raised on a multigenerational beef cattle farm, her work is deeply autobiographical, using animals, domestic objects, and rural landscapes as metaphors for life, death, and the complexities of human-animal relationships. As a sixth-generation settler-colonial Australian, her practice engages with the cultural complexity and inherited legacies of living on unceded land.Exploring themes of parenthood, preternatural experiences, and connection to place, she primarily works with charcoal and graphite on cement fibreboard, creating drawings that use flattened perspectives and manipulated scales to amplify emotional resonance. Richardson holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Curtin University and has developed a strong practice as both an artist and curator. Recent projects include the 2024 TILT commission with Abdul-Rahman Abdullah at Goolugatup Heathcote and a national tour of her solo exhibition The Good, co-commissioned by Wagga Wagga Art Gallery and The Condensery, touring regional galleries across Australia until 2026. In 2023, she was the inaugural winner of the Girra: Fraser Coast National Art Prize at Hervey Bay Regional Gallery.
Exhibition statement:
In these works Richardson reimagines the Welcome Swallow as both subject and metaphor, tracing threads of care, resilience, and connection across generations, species, and place.
Anna Louise Richardson
Swallows II, 2024, Graphite on paper, 56 x 76 cm (frame 63 x 82.5 x 4 cm)
Mother / Work
Art / Labour
Exhibition essay by Zoe Freney
MOTHER is a verb and a noun; to do and to be. The artists in this exhibition explore a diversity of ways to be mothers and to engage in the work of mothering, through expanded drawing practices including works on paper, painting, sculpture, performance and photography. They contribute to an ongoing project led by artist mothers, bringing to light what has long been hidden by the Western canons of art history and feminism, and from mainstream modes of representation.[i] Through their work the artists in MOTHER explore a range of maternal experiences beyond the idealised, sentimentalised or commercialised to instead admit to the struggles, the spilt milk, blood and tears, the ‘full, messy and beautiful,’ life of being and doing.[ii]
The labours of mothering and making art are twin points of adversity in Australia. A study recently released by RMIT and the University of Melbourne finds artists earn on average just less than $14000 a year from their arts practices. While women make up 74% of this workforce, their average earnings are 47% less than those of their male counterparts.[iii] The Visual Arts Work report recognises structural issues that lead to the gender pay gap and the failure of women to ‘progress… to “established” career stages in line with men.’[iv] To address these issues, the report’s recommendations include, ‘Affordable childcare for artists with care-giving responsibilities…’[v] It is hard to justify paying for childcare in order to continue a precarious and speculative art practice, against still extant patriarchal ideologies of women as natural carers.
The financial struggles of mothering and art working are paralleled by the sudden paucity of time, when hours are no longer one’s own, and by the catastrophe of identity brought about by becoming mother, when even one’s own self must be shared. This coalescence of intensities can amount to an overwhelming experience, an ongoing interruption to normal life. Or a new normal, where the newness carries meaning, where the potentiality and futurity of parenting and the relationality of caring for others is valued and remunerated.
Lisa Baraitser in her exploration of the maternal subject writes how the ‘extremities’ of motherhood create new ‘raw materials,’ new ways for the mother to experience herself and others.[vi] In Heave, 2024 Fran Callen harnesses the stuff of daily routines as well as more seismic family events along with materials collected and accrued by herself and her children. These are laid down on canvas-as-kitchen-table, and grow up like plaster stalagmites, the accretions of a maternal life. In her studio, a space for ritual and creation, Alexia Fisher shapes her materials without tools to impart in them the physical and emotional tension carried in her body. This way she explores contradictory states of fragility and strength, care and brutality, the temporal and permanent. [vii]
Baraitser reflects on the sensations of being caught in between states, interrupted.[viii] She re-evaluates these moments to suggest they may lead to an ‘eruption of being,’ or a new way of thinking.[ix] The intertwined figures of Sanné Mestrom’s Maternal Cosmos are physical manifestations of the profound transformations brought about through matrescence, becoming a mother. Mestrom observes that life takes on new dimensions that include strange convergences of internal and external states and conjunctions of past and present.[x] The physicality and emotions present in ‘the liminal state… of mother-becoming,’ are explored by Madeline McGregor in Touchstone, 2025.[xi] In becoming one thing there may be the experience of un-becoming something else. In this vulnerable, transitional time McGregor speaks about seeking a reference point, perhaps through connection to place and cycles of nature.
Anna Louise Richardson’s drawings also use the land and animals as metaphors for deeper emotional and existential themes including parenthood, family relationships, intergenerational exchange and settler identity.[xii] Alongside Swallows II, 2024, a close observation of the intimacies of the avian family, Nest, 2024, is a study in downy softness and care. But the intensely detailed drawing also undoes the sentimentality of the image of mother and baby bird, revealing the tangles and mess of a nest, the abject untidiness of the lived experience of care. Similarly, Jingwei Bu’s Hairy Tales 1 and 2, 2018, evoking strands of fallen hair drawn in swirling, rhythmic lines, reimagine the abject as a material and a symbol, with deep cultural and personal significance. Bu writes, hair ‘carries our DNA, our history, and our shedding selves,’ echoing ‘the cycles of life—birth, growth, and eventual dissolution—resonating with the experience of motherhood and the passage of time.’[xiii]
Notions of time, endurance and transmission of knowledge as well as deep connections to Country are evident in the work of Pitjantjatjara artists Megan Lyons and Nyunmiti Burton. Lyons comes from a long line of artists, including her grandfather, painter Tjilpi Tiger Palpatja and her Aunty Kukika Adamson who paints alongside her at the APY Art Centre Collective. Lyons paints Piltati, the Tjukurpa of the Wanampi (water snakes).[xiv] She says,
I always think about this story when I paint. Back in the old days if a woman was pregnant and was going into labour, they would take her to a cave to have the baby. My great grandmother was travelling west when she needed to stop and have her baby. Her family took her to the cave at Piltati and my grandfather was born there. That's why we became part of that story and that country. And that's why I know and paint that Tjukurpa.[xv]
Tjukurpa is central to the work of senior Pitjantjatjara woman and esteemed artist Nyunmiti Burton. She paints Kungkarangkalpa, the Seven Sisters Tjukurpa, which was first taught to her by her mother, Tinimai. Burton speaks of the importance of women leaders in sharing knowledge and culture,
When I paint, I think about my country… I think about the past and about the future. I think about my ngura (land/home), where me, my children and grandchildren live. I think about the stories my father and grandparents shared with us. And I also think about my children and grandchildren’s future, the next generation.[xvi]
Women’s time has been described by Karen Davies as continuous, with few opportunities to take ‘time out.’[xvii] Time expressed as the ongoing labour of mothering is explored by Zoe Freney in Z and A on the couch, 2025, a pastel drawing that depicts her adult and teenage sons. Observed from a low viewpoint the subjects are seemingly oblivious to the presence of the artist, signalling their move into adulthood and the shifting maternal-child relationships. Time as constancy of care is an idea expressed by textile artist Lottie Emma. The work Mother Shield Forever and Ever, 2025, explores themes of disempowerment, resilience, and hope, shaped by her experience as a mother to a child with special needs.[xviii] Made of repurposed fabrics and using machine embroidery techniques the shield-shaped forms also recall the vulnerable folds of the body’s interior.
Harriet Body’s multidisciplinary practice is grounded in care and community and uses slow, meditative processes to explore cycles of growth and impermanence. Sonlight creates a world encircling the warm light of the central bulb, perhaps an allusion to orbits of care. Ali Noble’s multidisciplinary practice gently disrupts the hard-edged exhibition space with what she calls ‘soft-contrariness.’[xix] Textile’s sensual and poetic qualities are harnessed to cultivate colourful spaces of magic, play, and transformation.
Hettie Judah in Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood, describes how western art ‘for centuries… promoted a maternal ideal to which no flesh-and-blood woman could measure up…’[xx] In the work Dust, 2023, Atong Atem meets these impossible ideals with her own experience of motherhood and its embodied intensities. She centres the Dinka women of South Sudan and ‘explores their relationship to the rupturing history of Christianity and colonialism.’[xxi] The ambiguity of the faceless figure suggests Madonna or goddess, or the erasure of identity of the earthbound mother. Atem describes the moment of recognition of a new intersubjectivity when she was surprised to see her baby’s reflection alongside her own in a train window.[xxii]
A mother’s loss and grief is embodied in the Christian tableau of the pieta – pity or compassion - depicting the Virgin Mary cradling the lifeless body of Christ. The power of this composition lies in its contradictions: divine figures shown in human fragility, transcendence expressed through a mother’s earthly mourning. Across time, La Pietà has been reimagined to speak to war, trauma, and care, used by contemporary artists to highlight collective suffering, gendered labour, and the politics of remembrance. In Katy B Plummer’s video La Pietà, 2014, the artist cradles and sings a song explaining art to a giant dead rabbit. This is an act of resistance towards both the unachievable perfection of the Virgin Mary and the heroic genius of conceptual art. Beyond Dada, this is Mama. The capacity for invention and experiential knowledge of the mother artist exceeds patriarchal imagination. She can create.
The structural and cultural exclusions of motherhood have meant each new generation of artist mothers must reinvent ways of balancing mother work and art labour. What is at stake in this impossible balance is the exploration and representation of the full range of maternal experiences, the creative negotiation of relational subjectivities brought about by care work. But what emerges in MOTHER is the inventiveness of artist mothers, their tenacity and passion, and what they share with us of the absurd, surreal, messy, interrupted, loving, desperate, complexities of mother work.
[i] Martina Mullaney quoted in Hettie Judah. 2022. How not to exclude artist mothers (and other parents). London: Lund Humphries.
[ii] ‘Martha’, artist quoted in Hettie Judah. 2023. ‘Full, messy and beautiful,’ Unit London. https://unitlondon.com/2023-05-31/hettie-judah-full-messy-and-beautiful/ (viewed 19/4/25).
[iii] Hannah Story. 2025. ‘New study of Australian artists finds average income from art is only $14k.’ ABC, April 2. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-04-02/rmit-study-australian-artists-arts-workers-average-income/105126138# (viewed 19/4/25).
[iv] Grace McQuilten, Jenny Lye, Kate MacNeill, Chloë Powell, and Marnie Badham. 2025. Visual Arts Work: Key Research Findings, Implications and Proposed Actions. Melbourne: RMIT University and University of Melbourne. 31.
[v] Ibid. 30.
[vi] Lisa Baraitser. 2009. Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption. East Sussex: Routledge. 3.
[vii] Alexia Fisher. 2025. Artist Statement.
[viii] Baraitser. 79.
[ix] Ibid.
[x] Sanné Mestrom. 2025. Artist Statement.
[xi] Madeline McGregor. 2025. Artist Statement
[xii] Anna Louise Richardson. 2025. Artist Statement.
[xiii] Jingwei Bu. 2025. Artist Statement.
[xiv] Megan Lyons. Biography. https://www.apygallery.com/pages/megan-lyons (viewed 24/4/25).
[xv] Megan Lyons. 2025. Artist Statement.
[xvi] Nyunmiti Burton in Stories from Our Spirit: Nyunmiti Burton, Sylvia Ken, Barbara Moore quoted by Art Gallery of South Australia. https://www.agsa.sa.gov.au/education/resources-educators/resources-educators-ATSIart/tarnanthi-2021/nyunmiti-burton/ (viewed 30/4/25).
[xvii] Karen Davies quoted in Baraitser. 74-75.
[xviii] Lottie Emma. 2025. Artist Statement.
[xix] Ali Noble. 2025. Artist Statement.
[xx] Hettie Judah. 2024, Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood. London: Thames & Hudson. 19.
[xxi] Atong Atem Dust. 2023. Art Collector. https://artcollector.net.au/gallery-event/atong-atem-dust/ (viewed 24/4/25).
[xxii] Atong Atem quoted in Namilla Benson. 2024. The Art of… Australian Broadcasting Corporation, August.