Burnt Eggshells & All The Things I Left Behind: Reflections on Mothering, 2017 - 2024.
This is a series of works exploring themes including the hidden mother, protection, time, the pregnant body, thresholds and the egg. It was produced over a period of seven years including during the UK Covid 19 lockdowns.
The photographs in this series result from different processes which are all part of my practice. These include staged portraits of pregnant women; photographs of the natural world, specifically markers of seasons such as frogspawn and frost; and sculptural objects such as frozen ice orbs. The majority of the work has been made in the domestic sphere in enabling me to make work alongside my responsibilities as primary caregiver for my daughter.
Below is an extract from a performance lecture I presented at The Clunch arts space, Sussex in March 2025.
Hidden Mothers #IV, Sussex 2023, from the series Burnt Eggshells & All The Things I Left Behind.
The woman in this image, her face hidden, holds an orb of ice like a crystal ball – but the future is clouded – impossible to see. Like a medium or a witch, a mother exists at the boundary of seen and unseen worlds, cradling past, present and future in her hands, possessed by an other while trying to hold onto her own sense of self.
Lucy Jones in her book Matrescence On The Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Motherhood, quotes psychoanalyst Joan Raphael, who describes the way, ‘On a deep unconscious level, the pregnant woman hovers between internal and external worlds at a crossroads of past, present and future: self and other’. This photograph asks: who will hold the mother while she holds all this frozen in her hands?
The hidden face of the mother relates to portraits of babies in the Victorian era, which, due to high rates of infant mortality, were very popular. I came across a series of images called ‘Hidden Mothers’ in Ann Coxon’s book Motherhood. If you looked very closely at each portrait you could see a shape shrouded in fabric behind the babies. Crouching or sitting under cloths were the children’s mothers or nannies – holding them still during the long exposure needed to make a portrait. These photographs spoke to me about my post-partum experience as the focus shifted from a growing belly to a growing baby. With the newborn front and centre, there was little space to speak about a reality beyond that of a blissed-out earth mother.
Rachel Cusk, in A Life’s Work, describes motherhood as a process of ‘being taken apart and reassembled into two people.’ This process invoked feelings of grief and loss, which swept over me, but as time passed, I came to understand these emotions to be acknowledgments of great change. This image captures my wish to freeze and stop time amidst the unstoppable process of transformation.
Text to accompany photographic works.
Burnt Eggshells & All The Things I Left Behind
Frozen, locked down
Mothers to be face solitary labour
Time passes, our children grow
Tadpoles appear
The light in the house is warm
I am uprooted
The translucent skin on the swollen egg bursts
Yellow yolk on the floor
Time passes, we wait
I am a shapeshifter
Sent without knowing to cradle us
Patching up holes with brown paper
Time passes, she walks
I hold the tray of burnt eggshells
I wrap them in plasticky film and keep them safe for later
Time passes, I get forgotten
All alone in a darkened room frozen to the spot
I dare not move for fear I will wake her
I want to leave to join the others
But I stay here
with you
Florence
Jennifer Pattison