The maternal relation in contemporary photography
Donna Bailey, Pat Brassington, Anne Ferran, Anne Noble and Polixeni Papapetrou
At a time when the mainstream media is constantly reminding us of the declining national birth rate and the increasingly cynical approach to motherhood that supposedly characterises 'women today', it is refreshing to see a more multifaceted and sophisticated account of the psychological and physical complexities that characterise the maternal relation. In a recent exhibition at the Monash University Museum of Art, 'The Line Between Us: The Maternal Relation in Contemporary Photography', such clichés and essentialist stereotypes about motherhood are eloquently refuted. Curated by Kyla McFarlane, this beautiful and often unsettling collection of photographs by Donna Bailey, Pat Brassington, Anne Ferran, Anne Noble and Polixeni Papapetrou speaks to the tense, intimate, emotional and highly negotiated relationships between mothers and their children.
Striking in this exhibition is the way in which the camera figures as a dynamic and integral component of these maternal relations. Donna Bailey's often difficult relationship to her adolescent daughter Zoë, now aged twenty-two, was in many ways negotiated through the camera's lens. Bailey's children, their friends and their environment at her semi-rural home in Kangaroo Flat, near Victoria's Bendigo, have for several years been the subjects of much of her photographic practice. Works such as Protégé (2004), in which Bailey's nine year old son, Ned, sits proudly and defiantly on the shoulders of an older male friend, and Generation Y Girl (2004) which shows an utterly independent Zoë confronting the gaze of her mother-photographer and viewer, refigures the camera as not only that which documents the lives of Bailey's children, but as a device through which a dialogue between all of the participants in the photographed moment is fostered and mediated.
The powerful presence of Bailey's children