Click image above to download pdf copy of Room Sheet and Exhibition Essay by Zoe Freney.
Group Show / MOTHER
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Z and A on the couch, 2025, pastel on primed paper, 190 × 115 cm. Photo: Sam Roberts. Courtesy of the artist.
