Alot of my work this year has been in collaboration with my eldest daughter.
In consideration of this I thought I should interview her about my work. I wanted to know what she found in the works that tell her about herself, I wanted to understand how she reads my work of her, to help me unpack the ideas that are brought together through these works and how these ideas are depicted through the work.
Sharon: How do these paintings of you make you feel about yourself?
Tash: I feel like they boost my confidence. They make me feel strong and beautiful. I feel like they are positive depictions of me.
Sharon: Do you feel this is how I see you?
Tash: Yes! But I feel like I look stronger than I expect, I feel like they are a reflection of how you see me. I think as my mother, you see me stronger than I feel, you depict the best version of myself.
Sharon: Do you see yourself in these paintings?
Tash: I do, but I also feel like I see you! As well as other woman. Because you are portraying the dance that women perform to fill the roles that they have within society. Both strong and submissive roles.
Sharon: Yes, in some ways seeing my daughter do this, has given me a space to recognise it in myself.
Tash: Yes, and I feel like you have identified and portrayed the way women change themselves into different roles, speaking to different roles, contorting their body's and mind's to the different roles within society.
Sharon; As your mother, and as a daughter myself, when watching you grow up I see different versions of myself in you.
Tash: Yes, it feels like a genuine reflection of your life's experiences and struggles.
Rebecca Solnit, in the text The Faraway Nearby, writes that, “For mothers, some mothers, my mother, daughters are division, that reduce them, fracture them and take from them.”[1]
Solnit has also influenced me by offering ways to consider female agency, mother and daughter relationships and feminism through creative practice. Like Solnit, I was a timid child, whose relationship with my mother was complicated. Through this conversation with my daughter, I feel like I am undoing or repairing some of my relationship with my mother, like Solnit.
This is work is an example from my series titled Body Language, and depicted many figurative versions of my daughter.
Body Language IV, 1080mm x 800mm, oil on Belgian linen
[1] Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby (London: Granta Publications, 2013),21.
Solnit,Rebecca. The Faraway Nearby. London: GrantaPublications, 2013.