Through the Mother
Solo exhibition at University of Queensland Art Museum
10 Sep – 18 Jan 2019/20
Curated by Peta Rake. Research supported by Heather Smyth from Food Science at UQ.
Through the Mother is a multisensory exhibition that embraces how touch, taste and smell, inform our most poignant and powerful memories. The architecture of the space invites viewers to enter into a fragmented narrative that is pieced together by the artist through things that are familiar—a table, a stool, tea, wallpaper, a shed—but rendered strange by wax and bush, grease and hibiscus, valerian and patchouli.
Triggered by a childhood memory of her mother drying plants upside-down in her father’s backyard shed, Brisbane-based artist Elizabeth Willing has imposed a hand-drawn gesture onto the surface of the mirrored steel and glass façade of The University of Queensland (UQ) Art Museum building. Willing complicates this memory further in the interior of the museum. Vernacular architecture is conflated within her installation: the viewer enters the quintessential hallway of a ‘Queenslander’ style bungalow made humid with scented waxes, passing through into a space of the domestic, only to realise that they are inside a backyard shed.
Centred in the space is a spotted gum table, with floral carvings of eucalyptus, strawflower, lavender, yarrow, marijuana, and hydrangea. Stools circle the table, all treated with the Tasmanian pepperberry wax, a curious biproduct which is said to smell like the Australian bush, with a hint of lantana. The wallpaper framing the space, which at first looks like paper doilies, is in fact based on a Rorschach pattern made from the deep purple ink of pressed St John’s Wort—a natural anti- depressant, which the artist harvested in Armidale, NSW.
Throughout the exhibition, tea is served for the audience. A mixture made by the artist and her mother, is a calming blend of valerian, passionflower, hibiscus, rooibos, and cinnamon; each ingredient possessing its own medicinal benefits, from the soothing of anxieties to the ceasing of inflammation.
The title of the exhibition, Through the Mother, has several connotations: a passing down of information and practice through a matrilineal line; ‘mother’ as a source; a ‘mother plant’, which is grown for the purpose of taking cuttings in order to cultivate other plants; and to ‘mother’ as an act. The artist has sought to give both physical and ephemeral form to memories of her mother, conveyed through smell, taste, and texture. The exhibition space is both familiar and unsettling—the tight hallway, the dark shed—gesturing to the way in which memory is always only ever a fragmented reconstruction of actual events.
- Curator Peta Rake
