Cradle
20 June – 14 July 2024
PV 20 June, 6pm – 9pm
28 Shacklewell Lane, Dalston, E8

Anne Berg, Annabel Emson, Camilla Emson, Marenka Gabeler, Clementine Keith-Roach, Hannah Rowan

Curated by Anna Souter

For more information or a list of available works please email anna@annasouter.net

Cradle positions the maternal body as a site for exploring ecologies of care, resilience, and healing. Bringing together six artists working across a variety of media, the exhibition draws out themes of vessels, containment, and cradling, asking questions about how we hold our children in physical and psychological ways even as our bodies are simultaneously porous containers for our own pasts, emotions, and traumas.

The exhibition attempts to give equal weight to frequently trivialised notions such as familial love and the everyday labour of raising children, as well as to formal concerns regarding the boundaries between figuration and abstraction and the properties of artistic materials. Paint seeps through the re-woven threads of a canvas; light touches flecks of volcanic lava suspended in an orb of glass. Hands clutch at each other and at the emotionally charged detritus of babyhood. Other hands press into soft clay to release anger, or rest gently cupped in supplication or offering. What do we hold onto and what do we allow to pass through? And how do materials enact these containments and slippages?

Drawing on Sophie Strand’s assertion that everyone is simultaneously both a mother and mothered, Cradle further considers motherhood as a route for engaging with the multivalence of existence within an environment. Strand writes, “Your body mothers you. And child-like you nuzzle deep inside other bodies. Forest bodies. Spore bodies… Everybody is a mother. Everybody can turn to the other and offer a song, a wink, a fierce embrace.” In this formulation, experiences of gestation, birth, and care might offer a sharpening lens for adopting radical forms of labour and care outside the family unit. Cradle attempts to centre the maternal gaze as a method of re-examining the self as something leaky and unbounded, vibrantly emerging within the complex interconnected webs of our ecosystems.

Bringing together artists whose children’s ages range from 6 months to 60 years, the exhibition explores motherhood as a state of fluidity, the passing moments metamorphosing between extreme bodily and psychological states. The mundanity of washing out the stains of bodily excreta pushes paradoxically against the hilarity prompted by a simple smile, all while unravelling the impossible uncertainties of newly unfamiliar physiologies and the transition into a new identity through matrescence. Becoming compartmentalised, disembodied – a pair of hands or a leaking breast – while at the same time becoming a holistic system, a life-support system, the maternal body as haven, climbing frame, and cradle. Both noun and verb, a place to rest and an act of gentle protection.