Through photographic, sculptural, performative, and multimedia vignettes the artists synthesize the embodied and sensory maternal experience(s) with the semiotic, the material, and the domestic. The work is an invitation into the invisible performances of motherhood—the everyday, and the phenomenal—and exposes the subtle, affective, and transformative worlds often left unseen. As the work was created alongside and with the artists’ children, families, and lived experience of mothering, it negotiates and challenges the idea of the maternal as art. Rather than being dismissed, transitions and interruptions are valued and recognized as state(s) of being, allowing relations, bodies, and objects to transform and move from the banal and the mundane to the remarkable.

First presented May 26-June 18, 2023 by Eyelevel Artist-Run Centre in partnership with the Saint Mary’s University Art Gallery and Mayworks Kjipuktuk/Halifax Festival of Working People and the Arts. We gratefully acknowledge the support of The Canada Council for the Arts, Arts Nova Scotia, Dancemakers, and Halifax Regional Municipality.

Image credits: Hannah Minzloff and Veronica Guittierez