Hannah Perry commission considers motherhood, labour and class

The commission includes a sculpture, comprising steel and mechanical elements, which considers the physical act of labour and is choreographed to resemble a pelvis during childbirth. The work captures the force, violence, struggle, shock and trauma of the transition and its brutal, constrained power.

 The artist said: “Childbirth may shatter you into pieces and, while I allowed myself time and grace to recover physically and mentally, I still feel divided.”

A film and a spatial soundtrack explore this madness of personal alienation which the artist likens to the idea of the internal crisis of motherhood alluded to by Sylvia Plath in her poem Morning Song.

Matrescence is a period when the physical act of creation puts the concept of the self under threat and even leads to a struggle of displaced identity. “Perhaps, the process is to undergo an existential re-birth in which a past self, a past body, a past life, must now be mourned. A new self has been more or less replaced with the leaden experience of generations of mothers who I cannot relate to. I’m stepping away from my own singular experience and acknowledging the shared experience of societal pressure and pain of women at large.” said Perry. 

If part of the role of the artist is as perceiver, the mother’s role is as perceived, such as Madonna in Christian iconography. Can these identities be reconciled? How does the Madonna-whore complex and internalised misogyny contribute to the struggle for identity after birth? 

Hannah Perry: Manual Labour is on show from 22 June 2024 until 16 March 2025 at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead.