MOTHER: Stories from the NGV Collection

The opening salvo of MOTHER: Stories from the NGV Collection is as declarative as the show’s spotlit, all-caps title signage. Centred on the wall at the exhibition’s entrance is one of the most familiar images of motherhood from European art: the Madonna and child, this one painted by fifteenth-century Italian artist Giovanni Toscani. Hovering above this icon, however, the curators have suspended three conical mats made from pandanus fibres— Ganalbingu artist Elizabeth Djutarra’s Nganiyal (1998). These mats, I learn from the wall label, refer to Djutarra’s mother’s Dreaming, in which two Sisters traverse Country, giving birth to the first humans along the way. The mats are functional, too: they are meant to provide privacy during menstruation, cover a pregnant belly, or hold small children, although here they chiefly function as a framing device for the Madonna below.

Opening an exhibition about motherhood with a Renaissance Madonna and child is perhaps an obvious choice for a national gallery built on a collection of European art. Inviting a comparison, however, with First Nations conceptions and material practices of mothering indicates the show’s more nuanced ambitions: to bring these two different understandings of mothering into conversation, and as such tell a story about mothers that is specific to so-called Australia. If the Toscani painting (and the series of Madonnas on view in the first galleries) consolidate and transmit the Western mythology of the mother, the array of First Nations works (by Djutarra, David Mowaljarlai, Anniebell Marrngamarrnga, and others) presents a more varied understanding of the mother, one that is always in relation to others and to Country. Yet as incommensurable as Toscani and Djutarra’s works (and the European and First Nations conceptions of motherhood they represent) may at first appear (this incommensurability may well be the point of the curatorial comparison), they both speak to what mothers carry, symbolically and physically. In that act of carrying, mothers are always in relation to another, and this opens the possibility for the mother, and by extension the artist-mother, to be a form of relation rather than a fixed identity.

MOTHER is organised by Sophie Gerhard, Curator of Australian and First Nations Art, and Katharina Prugger, Curator of Contemporary Art, with assistance from Eva Christoff. It is the third in a series of NGV exhibitions presenting “stories from the collection,” following on from Queer in 2022 and Cats and Dogs in 2024-25. There is clearly an opportunism at work here, as the gallery engages in what Clémentine Deliss once called “recessional curating” (permanent collection shows tend to require less budget than temporary exhibitions), while seizing on vaguely zeitgeisty, or at least breezily populist, keywords as a way to traverse its collection (one work, Ethel Walker’s painting Lilith, appeared in both Queer and MOTHER). Motherhood may hardly seem like a hot topic to some readers but, like its bedfellow “care,” it has been the subject of quite a bit of attention lately, so much so that we may already be experiencing maternal-turn fatigue (the irony of which, I’m sure, is not lost on mothers). Nonetheless, the point is worth making: if art made by mothers, let alone about mothering, was rare in art history prior to the twenty-first century, in recent years a surge of artist-mothers, often making art through, rather than in spite of, mothering, has appeared within contemporary art and its institutions and discourses. And this work has been, in turn, exhibited and discussed, often explicitly within the framework of mothering. Long a taboo subject, if not a career-ender, motherhood has been the subject of a profound cultural shift, and now many contemporary artists—as well as writers, poets, filmmakers, and other creative practitioners—are making mothering the subject of their work, as well as its condition. Like Queer before it, this exhibition’s groundwork was laid by and indebted to these precedents, as well as a spate of recent exhibitions on the subject, including Next Matriarch at ACE in Adelaide in 2017 and Maternal inheritances at LaTrobe Art Institute in 2023.

Yet despite its recent visibility, motherhood remains difficult to frame. The artist Moyra Davey writes of the odd fact that “pregnancy and motherhood is this utterly universal phenomenon. I mean, obviously, it happens very differently in different places. Still, one could say it’s completely universal. But it feels so singular, too, to each person. How does one negotiate that? As a writer, as an artist?” The NGV exhibition manages this tricky double bind through a clever narrative structure: a series of rooms that unfolded the life cycle of a mother. Common enough and experienced by many, the process of matrescence, or becoming-mother, is as profound a transformation as, say, adolescence, but is rarely named and often poorly understood. This biographical or at least experiential arc of matrescence means that each gallery presents a stage along this “journey”: “Birth of a mother,” “Milk” (or feeding), “Baby bubble,” “Supermum,” “Bad mother,” and so on through to the concluding rooms on maternal loss and legacies. There are especially strong works in the gallery entitled “To love and to lose” addressing the Stolen Generations, like John Packham’s harrowing depiction of the moment a child is taken from its mother, her body immobilised as her limbs stretch with yearning and grief. The last gallery, “Maternal legacies,” is the most cohesive, as it features a number of works by First Nations artist-mothers collaborating with their children. The show concludes with Big love (2021), a terrific sculpture made by Matthew Harris with his mother, Glenice Harris: a suspended, giant stuffed heart, its outward-facing side made of possum skin, and its verso pink synthetic fur. .

Despite the cynicism about opportunistic curating expressed above, it is hard not to experience a kind of jouissance in encountering objects from the collection that are especially peculiar, outliers brought out of storage and displayed within a context in which they nominally belong. Like the twentieth-century Inuit serpentinite carving of a solid, striding mother whose child’s face peeks out from her hood, in “Baby bubble”. Or the nineteenth-century English earthenware feeding bottle in “Milk.” Or, in “Supermum,” Anne Graham’s 1993 painting, The fountain of the universal housewife, in which the “unsung hero of suburbia” finally gets her recognition as the centrepiece of the town’s fountain (although it hardly seems fair that she must eternally pour the water that keeps the whole contraption working).

There are also strong new acquisitions on view, including Ruth O’Leary’s photograph, Flinders Street (2017), taken at the photo booth at Flinders Street Station, which she used as an ad-hoc studio in the year after her first child was born. Clearly mimicking and skewering the iconography of the Madonna and Child and the nineteenth-century carte-de-visite images of literally hidden mothers holding squirmy babies for photographic portraits (a selection is on view in the next gallery), O’Leary holds her infant—we assume, since we don’t see her arms—and gazes directly at the photo booth camera, patient and still, her gaze meeting ours even as her face is obscured by a cut-out, heart-shaped mask (big love, indeed). It is an astonishingly rich image of the artist-mother, in which motherhood shapes the work as both a limitation and an expansion of its possibilities. O’Leary’s photograph could have easily appeared within “Baby bubble” or “Invisible mother,” revealing the porosity of the show’s categories, as well as the absence of “Artist-mother” as its own room within the show.

MOTHER’s curatorial argument is evidentiary, in the sense of presenting an abundance of material evidence. As such, it wants to make its point incontrovertibly. It wants to say this matters (the capitalised title emphasises the point), but not only does it matter, it’s omnipresent, everywhere, at all times. There is power in this gesture, both as an art-historical corrective and public pronouncement, given the role institutions like the NGV play in shaping civic and cultural values (although more on this below). But that evidentiary argument means that there’s simply too much work on view, not all of it adding much beyond sheer numbers (the room of mostly mediocre artists’ depictions of their mothers is a case in point). Each room holds a dizzying array of disparate artworks and objects, which can create a sense of transhistorical and transcultural whiplash despite their thematic container. The two walls of “Supermum,” for example, draw a very long bow from the Hindu goddess of Ananta Ram Rana’s Durga (2017) to O’Leary’s masked mum. Structuring the exhibition like a mother’s life cycle permits these very different works to be in the same room, and at its best this capaciousness nourishes a sense of what Virginia Woolf described as thinking “back through our mothers.” I agree with her (and I think this show does, too) that “we have many mothers, those of the body and those of the soul.” But the show’s capaciousness also means that we can’t grasp how motherhood has been understood, represented and challenged across different historical periods and cultures, and the peculiarities and specificities of our own moment of motherhood struggle to emerge and become vivid.

If anything, MOTHER isn’t opportunistic enough. As Ellen Keillar wrote in the exhibition’s digital publication (unlike Queer and Cats and Dogs, no print publication was made for MOTHER), “to see motherhood in its full complexity would require a structural overhaul of the current operating system.” No such overhaul, however, was attempted at the NGV. As the gallery confirmed in correspondence with me, the exhibition didn’t prompt any changes in acquisition policy, and the gallery did not announce any institutional changes to better accommodate motherhood amongst its artists, visitors or staff. This, to me, seems like a missed opportunity for an institution with real power to model—publicly—how to meaningfully engage with a serious, pervasive and under-recognised issue. There are resources for how this could be done. There’s precedent, too, namely the NGA’s Know My Name project, which leveraged the visibility of the temporary exhibition and a concurrent national conversation around sexual assault to increase representation of women artists and to galvanise institutional change, including through a Gender Equity Action Plan that outlined policy changes from leadership to acquisitions to staff development to community action.

I’ll close by returning to the show’s beginning. The exhibition is titled MOTHER, not MOTHERS. As the curators note, this allows the word to be understood as a verb, and as such resist an identitarian reading. Read as a noun, however, the title runs the risk of reinforcing the mother as a singular figure within our cultural landscape, and it may also unwittingly privilege a Western conception of motherhood in which there is usually just one mother. In many Indigenous cultures (a child may have many mothers, and the word mother can designate a range of women and their relations to that child: mothers, sisters, and aunts. In place of monomaternalism, itself a fairly recent phenomenon, there is a millennia-long practice of polymaternalism. The experience of mothering is one that should be, and often is, shared, rather than limited to a single individual, overdetermined and thus bound to fail, overworked and underpaid or not paid at all, under-supported and isolated, so as to prevent collective agency, solidarity and, therefore, power. All told, Western modernity’s steely focus on a single “real” mother is profoundly ideological. It is offered to mothers as natural and inevitable, but the polymaternalism that is foundational to Aboriginal understanding of mothering proves alternatives exist—have long existed. Elizabeth Djutarra’s Nganiyal, which opens the show, recalls her mother’s Dreaming, and that is a story about two sisters—two mothers—not one.