Mother

Mother
1996

Media: powder coated steel, Perspex, fluorescent light fittings, wire, bird’s nest, ball, text, 

Size: dimensions variable, 800 x 1100 x 1400mm (each cot object x 2), 

Exhibited:

2008 – Locations (one-person exhibition), OVADA, Oxford. 1997 – “…from the institution." (one-person exhibition), Stoke-on-Trent City Museum and Art Gallery. 

1996 – mere jelly (group exhibition with catalogue essay by Stuart Morgan), Transmission Gallery, Glasgow (August), Keele University Art Gallery (October). 

1996 – Multiaccentuality (group exhibition), Keele University Art Gallery.

About this work:

Mother (1996) is a multi-part sculptural work that included large twin objects that masquerade as institutional cots. However, unlike other works made around this time (e. g. Mute, Sluice, and Flat Spring), the cot-like objects from Mother were not adapted from found materials and objects but were instead specially fabricated from steel and industrially powder-coated in a dull, ‘institutional’ oatmeal colour. In my modified design, a concept of hybridity is introduced through replacing bedsprings with light-boxes. The twin cots, are interconnected by means of a coiled electrical flex which, in-turn, leads from one of the cots to the gallery’s electrical supply via an overhead lighting track. Inside each cot is a solitary object. One contains a small golden ball providing, as Stuart Morgan writes in the catalogue to mere jelly, “vague allusion to fairy tales like the Princess and the Frog recall[ing] pubescent fantasies”. The other contains an empty birds nest, and—like quarrelling siblings—the two cots appear to be pulling apart from each other within the gallery space, using architectural features such as walls and pillars to emphasise and animate a sense of precariousness, struggle and even violence. On closer inspection, those experiencing the work can see that the two cots have been placed in proximity to enlarged reproductions of newspaper advertisements, in red text, pasted to the walls adjacent to plug sockets around the gallery. These late 19th century texts are thinly disguised advertisements for illegal abortifacients offered for sale to women suffering unwanted pregnancies. Through the complete set of objects, texts, signifiers and juxtapositions that make up Mother the puzzle becomes clearer yet more unsettling. Dominant themes that have come to shape my more recent practice are very much in evidence in this work.  Absence as a motif is in multiple use to signify a missing presence, though it is purposefully unclear as to whether this absence signifies a sense of loss, grief or escape. There are no images to populate the glowing light-boxes that occupy the spaces of sleeping platforms of cots without human inhabitants. A child’s plaything (the ball) lies trapped behind bars either abandoned or purposely inaccessible. An egg-less nest lies in one cot providing doubled yet mutually mis-translatable signifiers of infant/chick protection, each object equally bereft of live occupants. The electrical supply that feeds the work via the umbilicus of the coiled cable is conspicuously sourced from the ceiling track (an architectural ‘institutional’ feature common to galleries enabling art-works to look their best), avoiding the more obvious and available power supply of the gallery plug sockets with their dangerous proximity to the temptation/salvation offered by the nearby texts. Stuart Morgan observed: “The over-riding impression is one of instability, and the effort to fit into society, a demand to which we are all forced to submit at some point in our lives.” The work explores what Morgan describes as, “the sense of being lost in an environment, which, like a Lewis Carroll conversation, makes no sense, but does so with a parallel logic of its own.”