Spinning

Collage on paper, 36 x 29 cm

£500

Do the built and invisible boundaries of our city intensify the feelings of frustration, isolation, loneliness as well as togetherness we experience as parents and caregivers? What are the public spaces that remain, or have been born out of the pandemic? How do caregivers and their children now congregate or linger? If a portrait were to be made of this multi-layered urban experience, what would it look like? While thinking of these questions, I have borrowed artist Lenka Clayton’s challenging framework of the Artist Residency in Motherhood (ARiM) over this past year and aimed to use the distractions of motherhood (ie “the fragmented mental focus, exhaustion, nap-length studio time” and/or whatever child-minding periods offered or arranged) as additional working materials and not obstacles to overcome. This rich and exhausting stage of life has inspired the development of interdisciplinary work which includes my collage series of "Caregivers" - a series that works to visually describe our daily ballet of crouching, caressing, wiping, rushing, pushing, lifting and balancing as caregivers throughout the public spaces, or living rooms of the city. Based on a photo I took at Santa Maria Novella Station in Florence, "Spinning" a collage made of hundreds of tiny paper fragments, documents a moment in time, of a caregiver with two expert travellers searching for their platform.