ARTIST STATEMENT
I use personal experience as a point of departure to explore the burdens of caregiving within contemporary society and normalize ambivalence as part of the maternal experience. The mother figures in my work are slumped, hold themselves up under immense weight, and either faceless or with faces overwhelmed by intense emotion. In my embroidery series, portraits are stitched on kitchen towels stained from daily household use. These towels embody the ongoing, repetitive maintenance labor of the mother and become the container for her emotions as well. The portraits are expressive, conveying feelings that are often viewed as inappropriate for a mother in our society to have–rage, exhaustion, regret–with thread color chosen to either render the emotion nearly invisible or to call it out dramatically. As contemporary society propagates a myth of the “perfect” mother, my work pushes back by validating the complicated, tense reality of caregiving and asserting the value of caregivers’ complex identities.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Katie Gresham (b. 1987, Virginia, USA) is a multimedia visual artist living outside of Washington, D.C. After the birth of her first child, Gresham returned to her life-long creative interests as a way to reconnect with her identity and process her experiences of motherhood. Her artwork has been exhibited at local galleries, including Falls Church Arts and Rhizome DC. Gresham’s work has also been shown in online exhibitions, including Art in the Time of Corona Vol 3., Maternochronics, Roaring Artist gallery and Brandi Hofer Gallery. Gresham was a contributor to Lenka Clayton’s Mothers’ Day collaborative project, which was displayed at the University of New Mexico Art Museum and The Arts Club of Chicago. Her work has been published in The Huts magazine and as part of Princeton Art Council’s Interwoven Stories book. Gresham’s embroidery and collage works explore the inherent tension in caregiving within a society that provides insufficient support to and holds unrealistic expectations of mothers. She seeks to validate the complicated and often suppressed emotions and burdens of mothering and assert the value of a more honest conversation about the needs and value of caregivers.
© Katie Gresham