REGISTER ONE: THE MOTHER

The only woman for the unconscious is the mother Freud said. As the first object of love, the mother is the first object lost and in a sense is always ever afterwards considered lost, even to the woman who subsequently becomes the mother herself.

^{Within the mother/ daughter scenario, though substitutes abound they never quite suffice, and so this insufficiency, and the woman's turning away from and hatred of the mother compounds the ambivalence between them, for she can never give her what she asks for, or what she wants.}

^{Going further: the child cannot escape the play of its mother's psychic life across its own, and the woman's identification and hostility to HER mother is double-crossed in the meshes of that mother's past, and that earlier daighter's desire and loss.}

^{In the course of the history of any family the Madonna of Infancy spins to face different ways to follow identifications. The clinging to the object, and the object and treasures that are clung to, can take on different guises within that repetition that is beyond pleasure.}

The lost object is always the occasion of desire and can only be represented in and as, absence and loss.

The mother of memory and loss takes many forms, the Madonna of Infancy, the femme fatale, the woman destroyed, the old woman, the dead woman; but they are all clung to with the same ambivalent intensity, recalled and searched meticulously."

 

The Only Woman 1985. Part 1: Rage- Section 1
Four sections framed colour photographic print 30" x 20"

 

The work deals with the process of a daughter mourning a mother, and is structured around the repetition of a limited number of photographic images (some taken from the family album), as well as press photos and the artist's more present-day photographic works at the time of the mourning .These photographs are emblematic for the particular daughter who is the producer, but they function iconically in the public domain. The manner of representation signals the stage of mourning when the bereaved clings to the lost object.

"The Only Woman 1984" is composed of four distinct series of images in photomontage format following the pattern of grieving traced by Freud in 'Mourning and Melancholia 1917': Rage, Pain, and Gaze and a further continuum.

The first series entitled "Rage", consists of four large poster-type images, presents in a dramatised form, the scenarios of loss and desire. The emotional response of the daughter to the Mother's death, is presented in a valorised form, as in serialised popular journalism. The characters are 'writ large' in a short-hand depiction, which presents them as larger than life, heroic, mythological.

The Only Woman 1985. Part 1: Rage- Section 2
Four sections of framed colour photographic prints 30" x 20"

The second series of images entitled "Pain", is ten small panels in two forms. This is the pain of the loss of the object, but the intimate version of the grief, rather than the more public version in the first series, and the clinging to the objects, the refusal to separate.

The Only Woman 1985 Detail Part 2: Pain
Ten panels of framed photographic prints 6"x 6"

The third series of images entitled "Gaze", represents the overcoming of the loss through distanciation and the process of severance. The texts produced as objects offer a distancing from the scenario, in the sense of a refusal of figuration, and the fragmentary presentation likewise, as though looking closely, but at the same time distanced; of being aware of looking and also of being looked at looking"

So it is that the meta section in the work is an image of the gallery wall with the first series of images - "Rage", hanging upon it. Here we are distanced from rage and pain. This panel is the very point of the viewer being seen, the point at which one knows that one is seen, and one can recognise that the artist has been an actor in that same place too.

(From an exhibition statement by the artist)

The Only Woman 1985 Detail Part 3: Gaze
Six panels of framed photographic prints 8"x8"