Art references in Jen Calleja’s Goblinhood

Edvard Munch, Goblin with Christmas Porridge (1881)

Vincenzo Campi, The Ricotta Eaters (c. 1538)

Paula Rego, The Seduction of Prince Pig (2006)

Farah Al Qasimi, Hand Print (2021), from the series Poltergeist

Philip Guston, Painting, Smoking, Eating (1973)

Witches (2024)

'Witches' is a courageously honest documentary by Elizabeth Sankey that brings together contemporary stories of postpartum depression and psychosis with the history of the prosecution of witches. Taking the form of an essay film, Sankey intersplices clips from popular cinema and television of witches and women in psychiatric institutes alongside personal anecdotes of women she met through her own experience of postpartum depression and anxiety and her time in a mother and baby unit. 

Sankey proposes is that perhaps some of the historical women who were accused of and killed for being witches may have been struggling with their mental health and hormonal shifts after birth. Instead of receiving treatment, they were seen as threats to societal order and God. Sankey and the interviewed women agree that it wouldn't be difficult to imagine that women in the Middle Ages suffering from these postpartum conditions were terrified of their own minds (and at times hallucinations) and the possibility that they might hurt their babies. Their suffering may have been so acute that in their desperate states, they could easily be coerced into confessing being a witch, a death at the stake a presenting a convenient suicidal escape and welcome relief from their ongoing horror. 

The film also suggests that the prosecution and murder of female healers and midwives for being witches has meant that we likely lost key generations of knowledge of the female body and pain, and experience and expertise supporting women through pregnancy, labour and postpartum that may have otherwise informed strides in women's health. Instead, with the threat of female mastery and dominance out of the way, the medical profession was taken over by male doctors and we know the rest... centuries of neglecting women's pain and wellbeing that has led to a disturbing gap in diagnostic research and treatment for women's health and ongoing, avoidable suffering.

Camille Henrot (1978-)

I love these 'consuming' / 'devouring' mother/baby paintings. 

Camille Henrot, What Did u Say, (2019). Watercolor on paper.

Camille Henrot, Eating tea, (2019). Watercolor on paper.

Vigdis Hjorth, Is Mother Dead

Rare that I take a photo of three different pages to return to. This book was brilliant, acutely well observed, raw and daringly complex. 

Is Mother Dead is an obsessive study of a daughter's efforts to comprehend why she is the way she is and where she comes from - how understanding and forgiving one's mother (for her rage and her suffering) seems crucial to understanding and accepting oneself, and what a daughter is to do if she not only does not have the privilege of having her questions answered and of reciprocated desire for contact, but also must contend with her mother's unequivocal rejection. 

Hjorth explores protagonist Johanna's reckoning of her mother's refusal of conversation and disinterest in collective healing and the ways in which Johanna resists this, inventing her mother in her mind, tracing her daily steps and routine, supposing her thoughts, feelings and hurt until this imagined mother becomes insufficient and unsatisfying. Instead, Johanna begins to stalk her mother's movements, eroding the boundaries and privacy long established to keep their lives separate. 

Blind contour drawings of Ned in oil pastel and gouache

Resting Arms

Cup of rooibos (or accidental interpretation of Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son)

Marguerite Duras on mothers and madness

"I believe that always, or almost always, in all childhoods and in all the lives that follow them, the mother represents madness. Our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we've ever met."

[Quote is referenced in Vigdis Hjorth's novel Is Mother Dead, which I have been loving. More to come on this.]

Elina Brotherus, Annonciation 2009–2013

The self-portrait series Annonciation by Elina Brotherus documenting her IVF journey at the Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood exhibition at the Millennium Gallery was the piece that touched me the most, bringing me to tears as I reflected on my own grief relating to my miscarriage this past summer. While my journey was different from that of Brotherus's, the hope and plans, the imagining of a child and thinking of their life, learning, and growth and the involuntary thwarting of those dreams, leaving you feeling most impotent, mirrored my experience of loss of something real yet, invisible or not quite there, at its most acute.