‘Usually it is something at once repetitive and accretive: carrying water from a rain barrel to a muddy hole, for example, or burying a toy car under wood chips, or moving sand in a cart, or building a tower. Bent on their labours, they are likely to require little labour from their minders. One can neither choose nor predict when it happens nor affect it much. At most, you fashion a pause. Tapering the energy you give off, lowering your voice, crumpling your body backward and low in the direction you want the ornery beast to follow, you might pacify it. The sheep might settle down to graze. The children might settle down to build a tower. Anything ends it: the scent of a wolf, a wet sock, a property dispute. But until then you can read. You can work elsewhere. Maybe you can even write.’ (a)
‘If it is a human thing to do to put something you want, because it’s useful, edible or beautiful, into a bag, or a basket, or a bit of rolled bark or leaf, or a net woven of your own hair, or what you have, and then you take it home with you, home being another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people, and then later you take it out and eat it or share it or store it up for winter in a solider container or put it in the medicine bundle or the shrine or the museum, the holy place, the area that contains what is sacred, and then the next day you probably do much the same again.’ (b)
‘Within this already loaded interior, the kitchen table becomes a place of work while the unmade bed is still the repository of imagination. Windows and doors provide an interface between the home as an all-encompassing refuge and the world at large. Its exterior forms a resolute structure, a stony façade to present to the outside. Between and around these fixed, symbolic elements, the peripheral and the incidental seep in’. (c)
‘I notice that when I want to define today, I reach for history. When I want to define why I write, I reach for someone else’s words. When I want to define labour, I use time. When I want to define art, I use the world. This sort of gentle and deliberate counterpoint proves the subject, without improving it. The point of these exchanges between things is that what is lost is as vital as what remains. By doubling [and even dodging] the subject, the subject is raised in relief.’ (d)
My son recently painted a hurricane-like form on the bottom of one of my paintings which prompted me to paint a figure (a self-portrait, I think) holding the ‘hurricane’. It felt metaphoric, symbolic, slightly ambiguous yet honest. How do you hold a hurricane? How do you hold close things that are spiralling out of your control? How long do you hold on, and how do you know when to let go? Can you half hold on? How do we hold households, children, partners, parents, paintings, and ourselves simultaneously? How do we measure domestic, creative and maternal labour? With time? How does one get more time in a day? I find myself holding and carrying all kinds of things; both literally and metaphorically: bags, baskets, guilt, breakfast, children, landscapes, homes, backpacks, bikes, bromeliads, bowls, tubs, vases, thoughts, paintings, plants.
These new works arrange and recontextualise intimate experiences with art historical references to speak to the ways motherhood, domesticity and creative practice are, for me, reciprocal and ultimately entangled. The paintings deliberately dance between abstraction and representation and employ still-life and landscape motifs as symbols of containment and care.
Sally Anderson, 2024
(a) Emily Ogden, On Not Knowing: How to Love and Other Essays (2022), p. 45
(b) Ursula K. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (1988) p.32
(c) Kirsty Bell, The Artist’s House: From Workplace to Artwork (2013) p. 10
(d) Stella Rosa McDonald, Likeness - Exhibition Essay for Sally Anderson (2017)
