This year’s Mother art prize pays tribute to the joy, fury and hilarity of having kids – even the preview show was gatecrashed by toddlers
. It was inspired by the tokens that mothers left, along with their children, at the Foundling hospital, Britain’s first home for children at risk of abandonment, in order that they should be able to one day identify and claim back their offspring. Sea is formed of hundreds of swatches of fabric dipped in liquid clay and fired to create fragile, pale textured fragments where the original material has burned away.
On Mother’s Day I had gone to the Foundling Museum and seen some of the tokens for myself, and learned how rare it was that a woman came back for her baby. Sea pays tribute to these babies and the impoverished mothers who could not keep them. According to the exhibition guide, “the mothers’ intense feelings of separation and loss find a visual analogy in the vast ceramic outpouring.”, which is open to all women and non-binary visual artists with caring responsibilities.
A triptych of paintings by WK Lyhne are particularly striking: grotesque corporeal composites of canonical works of western art assembled in the shape of the Madonna and child. Stabat Mater combines a draped torso from Delphi, the head of a lion from a 14th-century Venetian plaque, and an Athenian minotaur. These paintings are some of curator Lucente’s favourite pieces.
; this year there’s Berthe Morisot at Dulwich Picture Gallery and Alice Neel at the Barbican. Neel, who was said to have left her baby on the fire escape in order to paint, never had a studio. Like many mother-artists, she worked at home, where she could do both. Barbara Hepworth, who is also featured in Julie Phillips’ recent book, exploring creativity and motherhood, always argued that having children need not detract from the work, and that the two in combination could nourish a rich life.
For the prize, submitted work does not have to be new, making it far more inclusive of those whose caring responsibilities have affected their ability to make fresh work. Nor do the entry criteria stipulate a theme – the works do not have to be about motherhood per se, though many are.
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