The ties that bind: a new exhibition at NGV explores motherhood

When Kate Just met her son, two-year-old Harper, he came to the door of his foster carer’s home, shook her hand and said: “Hi Mum”.

In that moment, she had a striking vision of him wearing soft armour. “I could see in him that he had already experienced all this stuff that’s almost too much for a two-year-old to have to experience. All this loss of biological family, and the foster care, and moving around … that makes you armoured,” she says. “But then also he was so soft and open. So I just I saw it like an image when I met him, and it really was how he was. He had this protective layer but then was open and so receptive to love and attention.”

Two years later, Just knitted that suit and called it An Armour of Hope (2012). It is one of more than 200 pieces in MOTHER: Stories from the NGV Collection, a new show opening at the NGV’s Ian Potter Centre this month.

Curated by Katharina Prugger, curator of contemporary art, and Sophie Gerhard, curator of Australian and First Nations art at the NGV, the show features works from across the collection, across eras and disciplines.

It is fertile ground to be mined and sure to strike a chord, says Prugger, much like the gallery’s other recent themed shows, Cats and Dogs in 2024 and Queer in 2022.

Both curators have three-year-old daughters, and Prugger is expecting her second child, while Gerhard has a four-month-old boy. “We’re deep in the trenches of motherhood,” Prugger says.

Their experience of becoming mothers informed their approach to the exhibition, Prugger says. “We have really tried to foreground women artists as much as we can and mother artists themselves.”

The show, which was years in the making, is deliberately broad and all-encompassing. There’s the joy and pain of motherhood, from trying to conceive through to giving birth and adoption; ideas around loss and grieving including miscarriage and separation; the politics and changing societal expectations around the role, and the influence of historical imagery and more are explored.

Some works are celebratory, others domestic; some are confronting, others delve deep into the complexities of the role.

“We are hoping it will speak to all visitors,” Prugger says. “Everyone is born and has some sort of relationship to the idea of motherhood.”

To start, the curators laid the journey out from their mind’s eye, translating that vision into the plan for the show’s galleries. Three themes clearly emerged: Creating, giving and leaving. “The more we worked on it, it became clear that it’s like a life cycle,” says Prugger.

The show begins with the idea of the birth of a mother and features different types of conception stories. A beautiful series of photographs of a home birth, documented by Christine Godden in the US in the 1970s, is a reminder of how hidden the birthing process is, even today. Godden’s Untitled (mother breastfeeding on a blanket) 1974 is another wonderful offering, the photographer capturing one of the oldest and simplest of domestic tasks.

First Nations works are a significant part of the show, including Gunditjmara, Djabwurrung, and Anglo-Indian artist Hayley Millar Baker’s 11-minute video installation Entr’acte 2023, a powerful social commentary on the expectations placed on women.

Tracy Moffatt’s video MOTHER 2009 uses material featuring iconic Hollywood mothers. Made in collaboration with editor Gary Hillberg, it reflects Moffatt’s ongoing fascination with women, as well as the cinematic vision that underpins her work.

There’s also a massive installation called EYE HEAR U MAGIK by Hannah Bronte, which shows how ancestral intuition has been passed down through generations of Indigenous people. “It’s such a strong representation of mothers, grandmothers, daughters and just beautiful matrilineal storytelling,” Prugger says.

International artists feature alongside locals. Contemporary Chinese artist Sheng Qi’s striking work Memories (Mother) 2000 speaks to the loss of a mother country and his own mother. The graphic photograph shows the artist’s own hand – missing his pinkie which he cut off in protest after the Tiananmen Square protests – holding a photograph of his mother who he had to leave behind when he fled China for Europe after the June 1989 protests.

Qi cut off his finger in an act of despair and buried it in a flower pot filled with Chinese soil. He remained in exile in London until 1998 when he returned to Beijing.

For some time in Europe images of the Virgin Mary dominated ideas of motherhood, with all the ensuing – and in a contemporary context conflicting – traits imbued in her: purity, modesty and domesticity. That still has an influence even today, Prugger says. ”It could be an exhibition in its own right,” she says.

The show considers what impact that narrative might have had on First Nations people in Australia. It includes a dress that Quandamooka artist Kyra Mancktelow recreated from one her grandma was forced to wear at Moongalba (Myora mission), called One continuous string . “We’re thinking about all the cultural practices that were eradicated through the Christian visualisation, and also the impact that would have had on women’s bodies and birthing practices,” Prugger says. “Also they are these iconic works of art, beloved in themselves.”

Ideas reflected in historical works still resonate today, including an Indian miniature painting that tells the story of the baby Krishna being nursed by his foster mother. Another is a drawing by Queen Victoria, which depicts her infant daughter, while hidden in the background is her nurse.

There is simplicity and brilliance inherent in Ruth O’Leary’s Flinders Street 2017, shot not long after the birth of her baby. Wanting to continue making art but constrained by caring for her child, O’Leary visited the photo booth outside Flinders Street Station, donned a mask she had fashioned, and – holding her baby in her arms – took the portrait.

From there, the show moves into more political dimensions, exploring the myth of the “supermum” versus the “bad mother”. It explores how history and mythology has often interpreted women’s stories in a certain way, and pairs that with the concept of the supermum.

Many contemporary works talk about the struggle to try to do it all, as well as the invisibility of the housewife, Prugger says, citing a painting by Anne Graham, The fountain of the universal housewife, that pays tribute to a housewife, posing her in the centre of a market square. Acquired by the NGV in the 1980s, it hasn’t been shown to the public before.

The next four spaces explore caring for the child and the mother’s work. Davida Allen’s Baby 1989 – a depiction of the mayhem that is dinner time with a small child – captures something of the constant toil that can be joyous and a nightmare, sometimes changing from one to the other within minutes.

“Probably many of these moments you can look back on fondly but in the moment it’s hard to enjoy,” says Prugger.

Invisibility of mothers is another theme, both historic and contemporary. Even today many women tend to take the photographs so rarely appear in them – and the show investigates this happening back when the medium of photography began. So-called “carte-de-visite” are early studio photographs, loosely known as hidden mother photographs. “They took so long to develop or expose the photographs mothers would hide behind cloths or chairs and hold up the children to get a focused image,” says Prugger.

The last room explores the idea of leaving and leaving behind. A range of stunning, diverse imagery sees various artists pay tribute to their mothers. French conceptual artist Sophie Calle uses a taxidermied giraffe in her work to stand in for her mother, who recently died.

British artist David Hockney’s My Mother Sleeping 1982 is a tender, poignant collage of his elderly mother sleeping; it was acquired for this show.

The next two spaces covers ideas around love and loss. “They’re really the most emotional and heartbreaking works that talk to the loss of a child or a mother, as well as a specific focus on the First Nations Stolen Generation stories,” says Prugger.

Historical works feature also throughout, including Anguish by August Friedrich Albrecht Schenck c. 1878, an iconic work that’s a favourite in the salon at NGV International.

Despite one in four pregnancies in Australia ending in miscarriage, the curators found that there were no works in the NGV collection depicting that experience. A series based on collages by American artist Joanne Leonard, made around the time she miscarried, were acquired for this show.

These works are incredibly visceral, says Prugger, who is delighted to “bring in this amazing feminist work, which has a history of being censored when it was first made”.

Leonard wrote about her work in 2008 that “it might be difficult for a contemporary reader to appreciate how unusual it was at this time to make or find acceptance for art about an intensely personal subject like miscarriage.” Writing in Being in Pictures: An Intimate Photo Memoir, she continued “artistic precedents that existed were largely unknown or rarely seen by artists of my generation.

“Not long after I finished the miscarriage journal, I discovered Frida Kahlo’s 1934 paintings about her own miscarriage. I felt a sense of connection to this work, and gratitude to the newly active women’s movement for its efforts to restore missing women artists to their rightful places in history.”

The final part of MOTHER looks to the future: legacies that can be passed on from mother to child, which Prugger says includes many beautiful First Nations works that reflect intergenerational knowledge transfer. “Those stories are very much thinking about what has come and what will be left behind and what is being carried into the future.”

Grief prompted Kate Just’s evolution from being a painter to a knitter. Six months into her art course in Melbourne, her younger brother died, and she went home to the United States. She found her Mum sitting on the couch doing two things she’d never seen her do: smoking and knitting.

Just sat next to her mother and learned to knit. “We were just in such a state of grief that while I was learning, I just felt like, you could use knitting to tell all the stories of women’s loss and pain and connection. It would be the perfect medium because you make a whole new world by these loops you make,” she says. “It felt like our whole worlds were falling apart. But loop by loop, you make this whole new thing, so it just very profound. And then I went back to art school and I never made another painting.”

Just says the way she learned from her mother “is the way you would ancestrally.

“In almost every culture in the world, women have learned craft from other women like that, sitting alongside, watching, trying, being corrected, ” she says.

“There’s not a lot of verbal chat, necessarily. It really grounds you in some kind of connection if you learn that way, it just taps you into this whole lineage.”

MOTHER: Stories from the NGV Collection is at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia from March 27–July 12.