The Mother as a creator

2001-2020까지의 아티스트가 아들과 찍은 사진들의 컬렉션이다. 임신한 상태의 첫번째 사진부터가 범상치 않다. 흔히 임신중 화보라고 치면 우아하게 옆라인을 보여주는 그런 통속적인 이미지를 떠올릴텐데 익숙한 속옷을 입고 카메라 정면을 쳐다보는 포즈의 그녀가 위풍당당하기만 하다. 뱃속의 아이가 나와서 작가는 다음사진을 찍는데, 그 이전의 사진을 배경으로 해서 오버랩 시키는데 물리적으로 배경에 프린트한 사진이 포토샵보다 훨씬 더 콜라쥬의 효과가 생기는 듯 하다. 특히 세번째 네번째로 갈 수록 더 겹쳐지고 멀어지면서 사진속의 거리감만큼 시간적인 거리도 동시에 깊어지기도 한다. 아이가 자라는 모습도 눈에 띄지만 엄마가 나이들어가는 모습도 현저하게 느껴진다. 아이가 커가는 20년동안 젊은 여자가 중년으로 가는 그런 흐름도. 언젠가 나도 엄마가 된다면 사진관에서 찍는 것보다 이런 프로젝트를 해보고 싶다.

 

Like an artist, the Mother is wise in her creation. The Mother not only creates a life, but also a continuous matrix of experiences between Mother and Child. Motherhood is a long-term process full of a myriad of complex feelings. This complexity cannot be expressed solely by saccharine images of Mother and Child, nor by the image of the Mother Incarnate willingly sacrificing herself for the sake of her children. All of these stereotypes of Motherhood are for me a tedious, unavoidable harangue which offers me no consolation. It is from this I derive the original motivation for this series.
 
Since getting pregnant in 2000, I had been burdened with pregnancy pains and the fear of losing my sense of self, and so I attempted to use art creation to preserve my sense of self during motherhood. From recording how in the beginning the Mother had lost her sense of self, to the notion of constantly creating, I attempted to reconcile my role as both Mother and artist to express a complex, diverse, and creative Motherhood. I am confident that “The Mother as a Creator” series, which took twenty years, not only proves that the Mother can maintain her sense of self, but also that creativity can overturn many of the myths associated with Motherhood.
 
Starting from the first self-portrait taken in 2001 on the day before I was due to give birth, my son and I would take a new photo together in front of the previous formal family photo every time we had a common life experience. Thus, the different life stages and appearances of my son and me come together to form a single layer. These Mother and Son photos which at different stages of life are overlaid, and from which we created a dialogue compressed into one peculiar space. From within this dimension emerges a complicated, fragmented and diverse recording of Motherhood.
 
Through this continuous creation and self-reconstruction using time-tunnel artwork, I not only recorded our perseverance and the accumulation of our experiences, I also make it such that we can clearly observe how we grew and developed over twenty years. Most importantly, it is through living and the passing of time that the representations of the many diverse notions of female self-reconstruction can challenge the one-sided and inflexible stereotypes which have traditionally been held towards Motherhood.

 

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The Mother as a Creator