‘Looking for Mother’

'Looking for mother', 2009, mixed media (size variable)

Looking for Mother (2009) is the privileging of the ordinary sewing box by placing it on a plinth in a gallery setting.  The sewing box once belonged to my mother. I was originally attracted to it because of the way it looked; there is something sculpturally attractive about.  Then I began to think about what an unlikely object it was to remind me of my mother, since she wasn’t the most domesticated of women. This contradiction led to me thinking about the significance of the sewing box and its contents in a wider context.

I began to see it as representative of the cultural meaning of ‘mother’. Yet how many women now darn socks and patch jeans, or indeed do any kind of sewing? Mothers are also daughters and sisters, friends and lovers, individuals with multifaceted personalities, but ‘mother’ swamps everything else, it is all encompassing.  More than a title, it too easily becomes an identity. You don’t even have a name once you become a mother, you are ‘mum’.  With this in mind, I became curious about the way I was trying to make my memories of my mother fit in to a social construction of who she was supposed to have been, rather than who she actually was.

I have used the sewing box both to illustrate this sort of traditional notion of ‘mother’  and at the same time to subvert it by introducing other things in to the content of the box such as newspaper clippings covering stories of mothers who don’t fit the accepted profile. I also listed the contents, adding events from my mother’s life from illnesses to holidays.  I hope that the viewer will initially have their own memories stirred and be tempted to look closer and perhaps think of mothers in a different way. The mother in the title refers to the idea of mother both inside and outside of ourselves.   The one I am as well as the one that I had.

A list of everything contained within the sewing box with the addition of illnesses and events from her life.