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. 

Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood at the Millennium Gallery

VALIE EXPORT, Die Geburtenmadonna (1976)

Camille Henrot 

Caroline Walker, Bottles and Pumps (2022)

D. W. Winnicott's list of why a mother hates her baby (Hate in the Counter-Transference, 1949)

The mother, however, hates her infant from the word go. I believe Freud thought it possible that a mother may under certain circumstances have only love for her boy baby; but we may doubt this. We know about a mother's love and we appreciate its reality and power. Let me give some of the reasons why a mother hates her baby, even a boy.


A. The baby is not her own (mental) conception.

B. The baby is not the one of childhood play, father's child, brother's child, etc.

C. The baby is not magically produced.

D. The baby is a danger to her body in pregnancy and at birth.

E. The baby is an interference with her private life, a challenge to preoccupation.

F. To a greater or lesser extent a mother feels that her own mother demands a baby, so that her baby is produced to placate her mother.

G. The baby hurts her nipples even by suckling, which is at first a chewing activity.

H. He is ruthless, treats her as scum, an unpaid servant, a slave.

I. She has to love him, excretions and all, at any rate at the beginning, till he has doubts about himself.

J. He tries to hurt her, periodically bites her, all in love.

K. He shows disillusionment about her.

L. His excited love is cupboard love, so that having got what he wants he throws her away like orange peel.

M. The baby at first must dominate, he must be protected from coincidences, life must unfold at the baby's rate and all this needs his mother's continuous and detailed study. For instance, she must not be anxious when holding him, etc.

N. At first he does not know at all what she does or what she sacrifices for him. Especially he cannot allow for her hate.

O. He is suspicious, refuses her good food, and makes her doubt herself, but eats well with his aunt.

P. After an awful morning with him she goes out, and he smiles at a stranger, who says: 'Isn't he sweet!'

Q. If she fails him at the start she knows he will pay her out for ever.

R. He excites her but frustrates—she mustn't eat him or trade in sex with him.

https://tpocambodia.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Winnicott-Hate-in-the-Counter-Transference.pdf

Esther Kinsky, Seeing Further

Attending the book launch for Esther Kinsky in conversation with Daisy Hildyard a few weeks ago at Juno Books, and going to the pub with Esther afterward was very special, especially on Shabbat where greetings were exchanged in recognition of common heritage. Esther spoke much about her time living in Hungary and her efforts to rehabilitate an old cinema in a small, otherwise forgotten village. She also mused about the magic of the cinema in so poetic a manner so as to tempt me to run to the big screen following the event and immerse myself in the collective viewing experience, popcorn in lap, the warm bodies of others palpable. 

In the following passage, Esther laments the changes to viewing and how we see in today's digital world - the viewing of films less an event for community congregation and collective viewing or looking in the shared cinema, replaced by an increasingly privatised viewing experience, not only from our own homes but also, at times from our own individual screens. Moreover, the on-demand experience of private, at-home viewing means the viewer is always the selector, which deprives her of the discovery of someone else's programming, of being moved by another's choice. 

I recalled my years in cegep, the college building located right beside a cinema, and my frequent solo trips to see a film in between classes, alone but together with others who shared my city. Somehow even 2009 feels like quite a different time. 

Sheila Heti, How Should a Person Be?

Monotypes part 2

Monotypes part 1

Shaolin Invincibles (1977) with live re-score by Chipzel

Fun event at Sensoria Festival!

Natsuko Imamura, Asa: The Girl Who Turned into a Pair of Chopsticks

Imamura's book is comprised of three short stories each that blur the outlines of what we think we know to be the human experience and what it means to be live and survive. The body morphs into non-human form, yet consciousness, sentiment and attachment remains. The goal of life to endure is challenged at its very core. Abjection is peppered throughout Imamura's stories: her protagonists—grimy, mouldy, dirty, stinky—and their transformations sit outside society and what we take to be normal, and evade not only what is acceptable but also what is possible. 

In this opening passage of the afterword, Murata describes the strange, but also the unnamed/unnamable experience of life, our bodies and our environment that happens outside or beyond language and words we can have available to us to describe them. 

Two surrealists painters mentioned in Lauren Elkin's novel Scaffolding

Remedios Varo (1908-1963)

Kay Sage (1898-1963)