Interlude/Motherlode Install View. 2025.
Interlude/Motherlode Install View. 2025.
Text From Exhibition Catalogue:
Interlude (A Pause Between Acts) is a handmade, cameraless film (still in progress) quietly excavating maternal experience reframed through the embodied lens of perimenopause. Using salt-crystallised, burned, and water-damaged 35mm motion picture celluloid as skin and scar, I explore decay, corrosion, and distortion as metaphors for the subtle bodily and emotional shifts occurring at this introspective moment in my life. Perimenopause is not exclusively maternal; yet, for me, its transformative unease, this faltering trust in body and mind, offers new ways to reconsider motherhood: past, present and still arriving. Fragmented 35mm archival slides and negatives of myself and my five sons as infants surface softly from textures of salt, water, and flame - blurring, flickering, slipping into shadow. Some dissolve too quickly to hold. Others stay too long. A few bleed into each other. One fails to appear at all. Many carry the unease of raising sons in systems that weaponise tenderness, where care bruises and masculinity becomes mask and mirror. Textual fragments whisper of missteps, detours, and loops: gestures of maternal spirals. Silence breathes uncomfortably. Haunted by quiet dissonance, fault lines buckle, and memories unravel awkwardly beneath skin. Perhaps this is grief. Perhaps it’s relief. Perhaps both. There are no clean lines here; only a quiet alchemy stirring beneath the surface, unseen, folding inward, reshaping from within. And still, we carry on unmended, unwinding, and yet, fundamentally here.
