Lindsay Page
Wednesday, 18 March 2009
Works from the series Spawn (still in progress). Titles (in order), Werewolf 1, Werewolf 2, and Unitled. I also recommend the Basement Performances Series.
“This body of work examines motherhood as an event steeped simultaneously in the intensity of anxiety and exhilaration, momentous gain and the spectre of loss. It is both a personal inquiry as well as public commentary on the dominant narrative of birth as a celebration. The transformation of pregnancy brings promise but also a horizon of threat, the loss of control and autonomy. The body begins to strain against the conditions of its existence, seeming to act with a will of its own, becoming unfamiliar and foreign, grotesque even, as it creates a presence unseen and unknown.
Upon birth, identity is suddenly submerged, focus and purpose are shifted out of love and necessity. Yet such a shift inevitably forces a confrontation with the prospect of one’s own disintegration and disappearance to be subsumed under the generic label “Mother”. This body of work highlights the contradictions embedded within motherhood and birth by exploring these shifting frontiers of visibility and invisibility. “