“The Joys of Motherhood” is a series of self-portraits about the gross physicality and social comedy of my experience as a mother.
This is a series of self-portraits in video, photography and sculpture about the experience of motherhood. “Joys of Lactation: Milk Stains” is a photo self-portrait in which I am wearing a blouse with milk stains on the breasts. Very common, but nobody warns you about it and it's about as embarassing as peeing your pants in public. “Navel Gazing” is a video portrait of myself pregnant with big eyes on my stomach looking up at me. This 42-second long video was shot in the days shortly before my son was born, when I wondered who was coming. "Falling Baby" was inspired by the electric feeling I got as I watched the little monkey crawl right off the bed, as if gravity were a learned concept.
My work uses ironic and self-deprecating humor to tell stories about my experience of motherhood. I nurse deep ambivalence about being a parent even as I enjoy nursing my son. My ambivalence is normal, but not well reported by other artists or the advertising media and certainly not codified in the discourse and history of the blue chip art world. I refuse to allow “Post Partum Document” to be the last word. It’s not even funny! Advertising discourse is no better: often they attack one’s social insecurities to pitch diapers, because you want the best for your kid, don’t you?
In my 2006 solo show “Close to Naked”, I was fascinated by my own pregnancy as a surreal and gross physical transformation. I made colorful rubber “Boob Balls,” brass “Pregnant Mud Flap Girls,” and “Split,” a life-sized sculpture in which I am pulling myself up through the floor, to face my own legs dangling from the ceiling. This was inspired by my ambivalence about my ticking biological clock; I felt like I had two brains - one in my head and one in my uterus.
The language of metal forms, machines, pipes, wires & gears are really beautiful to me. Monsters are also important, especially as terrific digressions of form that expose our deep fears and fascination. They are like little messages from the natural world confirming for me that God is a bored artist.
For this installation, I made wax casts of farm stand freaks and roughed them out with metal, paper and whatever plumbing and electrical parts are curious or maybe just on hand. My idea is to trap the accidents and try to repeat them. I spend a lot of time exploiting accidents in my casts, accidents found at the farm stand, and serendipitous messages formed by the accidental placement of one object next to another in the abysmal mess of my studio.
What questions can you ask a bell pepper? Is it always stiff? Always shiny? Edible? Or a poisonous, perverted yuck? What is its interior life? I’m not answering these questions here- they are for you to think about. Consider materials. These sculptures reward a curious touch with a slimy texture and a prickly thought: “that’s not water you just put your hand in…” The “what is it?” question hangs unanswered and you fill it with your own ideas. The pipes ask other questions like where’s it all going? A big processing plant behind the wall somewhere? What can it do? And Why? The questions posed by the work are meant to keep you engaged; the answer gives a release. It’s like the electrical socket in the wall, which I remember studying intently around the age of three. Where does all that wiring go? I can’t see it, so how do I really know? If you don’t know where the sculpture is headed then the piece continues for you even though I may be finished with it.
I think good contemporary sculptures reverse narrative (or formal) ground rules continuously over time. In sculpture this sense of time can be the works physical duration or the time it takes a viewer to absorb a piece (like walking all the way around the Jim Dine Hearts at the Decordova). For example, in the carrot series, the language of liquid transport (plumbing) becomes a path for carrots to travel. You don’t have x-ray specs. How do you really know what’s going on in there? Has water turned solid and orange? Are the carrots drips of frozen honey? We expect carrot and get water. You want crispy delicious and get a slab of donor organ sautéed in gold. It’s a mad world. - Ellen Wetmore 2004