Materfamilias

Materfamilias brings together artists who are also mothers, not to illustrate motherhood as a theme, but to examine it as a condition — one that reorganizes time, attention, labor, and the body itself. The works on view emerge from within that condition. They are not separate from it.

Motherhood is often framed through sentiment or expectation. Here, it is approached as a lived system: cyclical, demanding, generative, and at times contradictory. It alters the structure of a day, the pace of thinking, the capacity for solitude, and the relationship to one’s own body. It introduces a constant negotiation between care for others and the preservation of an inner life.

The artists in this exhibition work from within those negotiations. Their practices absorb interruption, repetition, fragmentation, and repair. Materials are handled in ways that reflect this reality — layered, accumulated, worn, mended, or provisional. Time is embedded differently: not as uninterrupted duration, but as something fractured and reclaimed in intervals.

What emerges is not a single narrative of motherhood, but a field of perspectives. Some works hold tenderness; others register exhaustion, resistance, or ambivalence. Many operate in between — where attachment and autonomy coexist, often in tension.

Importantly, this exhibition resists positioning motherhood as either limitation or virtue. Instead, it considers it as a force that reshapes artistic practice. Constraints become structures. Repetition becomes language. Care becomes both subject and method.

To engage with this work is to encounter motherhood not as an image, but as an active process — one that leaves traces in material, gesture, and form.

Materfamilias includes work by Cherice Harris-Nelson, Antoinette “AJ” Haynes, Daesung Lee, Emily Loughlin, Sarah Maker, Elsa Mora, Kate Stone, and Summer Yates.