Motherhood

About

A new series of paintings and drawings by artist Amy Shuckburgh explores motherhood in intimate detail. Her works, in oil and pastel of herself and friends with their own children, evoke the private world between mother and child - elevating the everyday physicality of motherhood: bath time, mealtimes, bedtime - to something poetic and beautiful. Her work rejects the traditional male-gaze view of the perfect mother and child, her images are never idealistic or heroic but real and, ultimately, truthful.   Jacqueline Rose, author of ‘Mothers: Essays on Love and Cruelty’ and Professor of Humanities, Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities has written the following about Amy’s Motherhood Series “Sensuous without a trace of coercive sentiment, embodied without burden, Amy Shuckburgh’s delicate yet bold and vivid images of motherhood manage to evoke a portrait for our time that avoids the twin pitfalls of idealisation and punishment.”

Arabella Brooke’s bronze figures are equally uncompromising.  The work is figurative, and she mostly uses the female form as a way of expressing universal questions about identity and meaning.   In the sculptures, we see women as single figures, as mothers, as friends, and as lovers, but never as idealised embodiments of ‘femininity’, as seen by so many (mostly male) artists of the past.    Arabella says, ‘I believe an artist has a duty to be truthful, even if this makes everyone a little bit uncomfortable.  The experience of being a mother completely reshaped me in ways I am still struggling to understand.  I think most of my work since then has grown out of the space created by this shift.’ 

In region of 50 works in bronze, pastels and oils will be on view, with prices starting at £200 for the works on paper, and over £2,000 for the bronzes.