Maternal
Meditations
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| She Nurtured Both Growth and Decay, by Carole Epp |
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| Sleep When the Baby Sleeps, by Jessica Gardner |
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| Internalized Norms, by Jessica Gardner |
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| Die Mutter, by Janis Mars Wunderlich |
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| The Navigator, by Kristen Cliffel |
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| Passages of Transformation, by Rhonda Willers |
By
Tom Wachunas
“Motherhood
has a very humanizing effect. Everything gets reduced to essentials.” - Meryl Streep
“The
phrase ‘working mother’ is redundant.” -Jane Sellman
“Be
a full person. Motherhood is a glorious gift, but do not define yourself solely
by motherhood. Be a full person. Your child will benefit from that.” ― Chimamanda
Ngozi Adichie
EXHIBIT: Crowns:
Crossing into Motherhood / at The Canton Museum of Art, 1001 Market Ave. N.,
Canton, Ohio / Through March 8, 2020 / Museum
hours: 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Tuesdays-Thursdays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturdays, 1 to
5 p.m. Sundays, closed Mondays. Free admission on Thursdays /
Exhibiting artists: Kristen Cliffel, Stephanie
DeArmond, Carole Epp, Kate Fisher, Erin Furimsky, Jessica Gardner, Eva Kwong,
Rose B. Simpson, Rhonda Willers, Janis Mars Wunderlich, and Summer Zickefoose
In her eloquent statement for this exhibit,
guest curator Jessica Gardner wrote, “Motherhood
in our society is at a crossroads. The intersection of home, career and
societal expectation is not a new one, but is now being examined through the
unforgiving lens of social media and the rapid pace of contemporary society.” Further, she noted that all of us are “… literally crowned by our mother’s hips as
infants in the womb, and the role of motherhood might be described as a
crowning moment for some…”
The notion of
“crowns” in this context might at first suggest a glorifying outcome - a
woman’s perfectly realized aspirations to achieve a societally approved
identity of the ideal mother. But navigating life’s complicated intersections
can be a particularly challenging journey for a contemporary mother, strewn as
it is with mixed promises of joyous fulfillment, angst and pain, failure and
shame.
The eleven accomplished ceramic and
mixed-media artists in this exhibit are all mothers who have probed their
transformative and complex personal experiences of motherhood. All of them have
made provocative works that are compelling not only in a formal aesthetic sense,
but also in their emotional, spiritual, and conceptual depth.
Many of the
pieces are poignant symbols of fragility and vulnerability, struggle and
searching for a reconciliation of conflicting ideas and forces. The woman’s
face in Carole Epp’s “She Nurtured Both Growth and Decay” is eerily serene even
as her flesh appears slashed by the passage of counted days. She wears a crown
of blooming roses, like a bouquet placed at a gravestone, signaled by the gaping
skull embedded in the top of her head.
In “Sleep When the Baby Sleeps,” by Jessica
Gardner, the pious-looking woman delicately set on a teetering mound of
pillows, plates and teacups resembles traditional representations of praying
saints. A devotion to the incessant demands of domestic duty? There’s a similar
sense of precarious balance in Gardner’s “Internalized Norms.” An aura of peaceful determination seems to
emanate from the woman’s head perched on a curvaceous pile of crinkled
porcelain chips. They form a strange, unstable mountain of sorts, as if on the
verge of collapse.
The totemic figures
by Janis Mars Wunderlich are marvelously
detailed, fantastical icons imbued with a primal spirituality. “Die Mutter”
(The Mother), for example, is an intriguing representation of a mother’s fierce
tenacity and resilience in raising children – an arresting meditation on
mothers as sanctuaries, at once beloved and beleaguered.
Kristen
Cliffel’s “The Navigator” is a delightfully luminous sculpture that looks like
something from a Disney cartoon. Here’s the proverbial larger-than-life
Bluebird of Happiness - wide-eyed and plump – sitting contentedly on a nest of
gold in a seemingly too-small boat. Ironically, this buoyant rendering of
domestic expectancy might well be a cautionary tale. After all, can having
babies really be so completely bright
and blissful?
Not
surprisingly, amidst the sheer diversity of styles in this exhibit, some works
are bound to confound easy interpretation. None more so than Rhonda Willers’
“Passages of Transformation.”
It’s a distinctly
minimalist vision comprised of 120 ironed tissues hung from almost invisible monofilament
threads attached to the wall with gold safety pins. Those pure white planes
aren’t all uniformly flat, but rather undulating, as if caught by a wind. There’s
a subtle tension, an enigmatic fill-in-the-blank suggestibility. Is this an
allegory, a terse metaphor for a
mother’s accumulated experiences and memories? Tissues. For wiping away tears, for comforting,
for cleansing. Maybe they’re the soft, fragile pages of a life both remembered and
yet to be written - variations on a theme of potentiality.
Willers’ work is profoundly poetic in the way
it embodies the overarching character of this entire exhibit. Heavy – and
wondrously contemplative – lies the crown.
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