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<\/p>\nThe opening salvo of MOTHER: Stories from the NGV Collection is as declarative as the show\u2019s spotlit, all-caps title signage. Centred on the wall at the exhibition\u2019s 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\u2014 Ganalbingu artist Elizabeth Djutarra\u2019s Nganiyal (1998). These mats, I learn from the wall label, refer to Djutarra\u2019s mother\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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Installation view of MOTHER: Stories from the NGV Collection, on display from 27 March \u201412 July 2026 at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne. Photo: Phoebe Powell.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cstories from the collection,\u201d 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 Cl\u00e9mentine Deliss once called \u201crecessional curating<\/a>\u201d (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\u2019s painting Lilith, appeared in both Queer and MOTHER). Motherhood may hardly seem like a hot topic to some readers but, like its bedfellow \u201ccare,\u201d 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\u2019m 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\u2014as well as writers, poets, filmmakers, and other creative practitioners\u2014are making mothering the subject of their work, as well as its condition. Like Queer before it, this exhibition\u2019s groundwork was laid by and indebted to these precedents, as well as a spate<\/a> of<\/a> recent<\/a> exhibitions<\/a> on<\/a> the<\/a> subject<\/a>, including Next Matriarch at ACE in Adelaide in 2017 and Maternal inheritances at LaTrobe Art Institute in 2023.<\/p>\n Installation view of MOTHER: Stories from the NGV Collection, on display from 27 March \u201412 July 2026 at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne. Photo: Phoebe Powell.<\/p>\n Installation view of MOTHER: Stories from the NGV Collection, on display from 27 March \u201412 July 2026 at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne. Photo: Phoebe Powell.<\/p>\n Yet despite its recent visibility, motherhood remains difficult to frame. The artist Moyra Davey writes of the odd fact that \u201cpregnancy and motherhood is this utterly universal phenomenon. I mean, obviously, it happens very differently in different places. Still, one could say it\u2019s completely universal. But it feels so singular, too, to each person. How does one negotiate that? As a writer, as an artist?\u201d 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 \u201cjourney\u201d: \u201cBirth of a mother,\u201d \u201cMilk\u201d (or feeding), \u201cBaby bubble,\u201d \u201cSupermum,\u201d \u201cBad mother,\u201d and so on through to the concluding rooms on maternal loss and legacies. There are especially strong works in the gallery entitled \u201cTo love and to lose\u201d addressing the Stolen Generations, like John Packham\u2019s 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, \u201cMaternal legacies,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n Installation view of MOTHER: Stories from the NGV Collection, on display from 27 March \u201412 July 2026 at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne. Photo: Phoebe Powell.<\/p>\n John Packham, Petin \u2013to abduct, steal, 1999, synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 117.7 \u00d7 175.5\u00a0cm. National Gallery of Victoria, MelbournePurchased, 1999\u00a9 John Packham.<\/p>\n Installation view of MOTHER: Stories from the NGV Collection, on display from 27 March \u201412 July 2026 at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne. Photo: Phoebe Powell.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s face peeks out from her hood, in \u201cBaby bubble\u201d. Or the nineteenth-century English earthenware feeding bottle in \u201cMilk.\u201d Or, in \u201cSupermum,\u201d Anne Graham\u2019s 1993 painting, The fountain of the universal housewife, in which the \u201cunsung hero of suburbia\u201d finally gets her recognition as the centrepiece of the town\u2019s fountain (although it hardly seems fair that she must eternally pour the water that keeps the whole contraption working).<\/p>\n England, Staffordshire manufacturer, Feeding bottle, 1850, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Felton Bequest, 1939.<\/p>\n Ruth O\u2019Leary, Flinders Street, 2017. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne \u00a9 Ruth O\u2019Leary.<\/p>\n There are also strong new acquisitions on view, including Ruth O\u2019Leary\u2019s 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\u2019Leary holds her infant\u2014we assume, since we don\u2019t see her arms\u2014and 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\u2019Leary\u2019s photograph could have easily appeared within \u201cBaby bubble\u201d or \u201cInvisible mother,\u201d revealing the porosity of the show\u2019s categories, as well as the absence of \u201cArtist-mother\u201d as its own room within the show.<\/p>\n MOTHER\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s simply too much work on view, not all of it adding much beyond sheer numbers (the room of mostly mediocre artists\u2019 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 \u201cSupermum,\u201d for example, draw a very long bow from the Hindu goddess of Ananta Ram Rana\u2019s Durga (2017) to O\u2019Leary\u2019s masked mum. Structuring the exhibition like a mother\u2019s 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 \u201cback through our mothers.\u201d I agree with her (and I think this show does, too) that \u201cwe have many mothers, those of the body and those of the soul.\u201d But the show\u2019s capaciousness also means that we can\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n Installation view of MOTHER: Stories from the NGV Collection, on display from 27 March \u201412 July 2026 at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne. Photo: Phoebe Powell.<\/p>\n If anything, MOTHER isn\u2019t opportunistic enough. As Ellen Keillar wrote in the exhibition\u2019s digital publication<\/a> (unlike Queer and Cats and Dogs, no print publication was made for MOTHER), \u201cto see motherhood in its full complexity would require a structural overhaul of the current operating system.\u201d No such overhaul, however, was attempted at the NGV. As the gallery confirmed in correspondence with me, the exhibition didn\u2019t 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\u2014publicly\u2014how to meaningfully engage with a serious, pervasive and under-recognised issue. There<\/a> are resources<\/a> for how this could be done. There\u2019s precedent, too, namely the NGA\u2019s 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<\/a> that outlined policy changes from leadership to acquisitions to staff development to community action.<\/p>\n I\u2019ll close by returning to the show\u2019s 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\u2019s steely focus on a single \u201creal\u201d 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\u2014have long existed. Elizabeth Djutarra\u2019s Nganiyal, which opens the show, recalls her mother\u2019s Dreaming, and that is a story about two sisters\u2014two mothers\u2014not one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The opening salvo of MOTHER: Stories from the NGV Collection is as declarative as the show\u2019s spotlit, all-caps…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":733739,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[354816,354814,354811,23760,449,458,459,64,63,354810,460,354809,134,15941,354808,354813,354812,190731,647,23759,23761,354807,229,354815,670,354817,261787],"class_list":["post-733738","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-ananta-ram-rana","tag-anne-graham","tag-anniebell-marrngamarrnga","tag-art-criticism","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-david-mowaljarlai","tag-design","tag-elizabeth-djutarra","tag-entertainment","tag-exhibitions","tag-giovanni-toscani","tag-glenice-harris","tag-john-packham","tag-matthew-harris","tag-melbourne","tag-memo-review","tag-naarm","tag-national-gallery-of-victoria-the-ian-potter-centre-ngv-australia","tag-reviews","tag-ruth-oleary","tag-sydney","tag-tara-mcdowell","tag-tracey-moffatt"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/733738","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=733738"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/733738\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/733739"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=733738"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=733738"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=733738"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"<p>Installation](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/fig.-3.jpg\")
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