‘The Nest’ and ‘Shadow (Nest)’ at The Mother House, I’Klectic, London

I exhibited ‘Nest’ and ‘Shadow(Nest)’ at I’Klectic, London in October 2016, the culmination of a month’s residency with The Mother House, a wonderful project to provide space and time for artist mothers to work and meet and support each other and their children.

“The dream house must be a cottage… a nest, a chrysalis.”

Gaston Bachelard, ‘The Poetics of Space’

“…when we examine a nest, we place ourselves at the origin of confidence in the world… Our house… in its dream potentiality, becomes a nest… [it] knows nothing of the hostility of the world.”

Gaston Bachelard, ‘The Poetics of Space’

With ‘Nest’ I continued my exploration of spaces and structures of security and nurture; the experience of the interiority of buildings.

For the drawing I used earth pigments that I made in the mountains of the Alpujarras in Spain this summer. Once the Moors used these same pigments to paint the interiors of their stone houses built into the mountains – a practice still followed today.

 

 

In the nest you are contained; you sit held, secure, high in the world, able to dream. Dreaming, remembering; voices, lives, new beginnings. A Mother House is a shelter that all artists should be able to fly into, especially those who care for little children, work so demanding, so rewarding, so exhausting. As artist-mothers we too need to be nurtured and to support each other as we care for our babies and our own secret precious desire to create.

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