It was in the last of the exhibition’s three rooms that my eyes started to prickle with tears. Laid out in a vitrine is ‘Under Glass’ (2020-25), a set of snipped, fragmentary photographic prints by artist Sophie Lee, a number of which depict windows from the interior. Thin curtains are drawn, hazy light bleeding through, frames casting shadows against the walls. They recalled a part of my own, fairly recent, experience of new motherhood; those blurry afternoons at home, when the prospect of leaving the house in the midst of feeding, changing, sleep, sleeplessness and frayed nerves feels truly monumental.
How can someone sustain an artistic practice alongside the deep, sometimes overwhelming dependency that comes with raising children? This is a question that LULL, an exhibition of work by five artist-mothers, curated by a curator-mother, Zoe Watson, both poses and finds ways to answer.
A grid of almost one hundred drawings by Linda Hemmersbach spreads across the wall opposite the gallery entrance at The Birley in Preston. Here, motherhood is the ultimate restrictive brief for making art; the subtitle on the label for ‘Untitled’ (2020-25) explains that the drawings were made ‘while breastfeeding, playing, on the train, watching TV’ over this five-year period. They capture moments of quiet, intuitive creation; small individually, but an expansive visual diary as a whole. Created with soft, repeatedly overlaid lines in coloured pencil and silverpoint, the drawings resemble fluid, organic forms such as jellyfish, coral, feathers and tendrils. Faces emerge, impassive but benign deities of this strange, ethereal world; they appear too in a pair of ceramics by the same artist, ‘Fertility Pot’ (2025) and ‘Night Traveller’ (2024), that evoke ancient fertility vessels, primitive and powerful.
Working at small scale is a practical way of navigating time limitations, and this is also employed in the work of Caitlin Akers. Her statement in the exhibition booklet explains how she makes prints in the quiet moments of her job in an art school, clearing up when students have left for the day – the brief ‘lulls’ referenced in the exhibition’s title. A set of nine monoprints titled ‘A History of the World in 100 Objects’ (2022) is suffused with tenderness and humour. The work references the BBC Radio 4 series that shares its title, in which museum objects are used to tell parts of humanity’s history. Here, these objects are drawn from the microcosmic worlds of the artist’s daughters; instead of ancient clothing items and drinking vessels, we find a jelly sandal, kirby grips, a plastic cup bearing a cartoon unicorn. Elsewhere in the gallery, vivid pink prints hint at the strange magic of childhood imagination in thick, velvety lines. An inky sketch, ‘Sleeping Beauty’ (2024), depicts two girls absorbed in some mysterious game, one tending to the other in repose. In ‘Unicorn I’ (2024) the mythical creature appears again, a near-ubiquitous presence on items made for small girls, rendered as a line drawing, reminiscent of cave paintings. On an adjacent wall hangs a letterpress print, ‘Calpol II’ (2022), in which the letters ‘cal’ and ‘pol’ float among a painterly murk of pink and purple, suspended in their own soothing gloop.
A feeling of sleep-starved fuzziness pervades many of the works in the show; a sense of existing on a slightly different plane to reality. In ‘Self Soothe’ (2025) by Lauren Steeper, the artwork’s title stands out in relief on a wall, formed from iced salt dough in rounded capital letters, like alphabet spaghetti. Ironically, these words can generate anxiety in new parents, with societal pressures to deliver self-settling, ‘self-soothing’ babies, that often feel unachievable when faced with the realities of looking after an infant. Here, the words feel like a mantra directed inward to their creator, a permission to draw calm from the act of making. Steeper’s ‘Watermelon Leopard’ (2025) is also created from everyday items. In this work, pieces of fabric – the faux-suede sleeves of a jacket, opened out and hung against the wall – are decorated with a surface pattern composed of the distinctive little rounded forms of children’s stickers. These shapes are rendered in opaque blobs of white household paint, leaving the viewer to have fun deciphering what’s held within the outline: a tortoise, an astronaut, or indeed a watermelon or a leopard. In both this work and ‘Self Soothe’, family activities such as making biscuits and playing with sticker sheets become meditative acts of creation and self-care.
The exhibition steps outside the home with the sculptures of Sarah Blaszczok, who has found moments of creative space in daily pram walks. The repetitive nature of these short, hyperlocal journeys, and indeed of many of the processes of caregiving, afford close attention to small details. As Blaszczok explains in her exhibition text, the curious eye of a toddler also serves to slow and draw focus to things that might be overlooked: a curled leaf on paving stones or the parallel lines of a drainage grate and a manhole cover. The artist captures these prosaic details as photographs on her phone, which are source material for the series of sculptures displayed here, ‘Middle Ground’ (2024-25), blown up to large scale and manipulated. Blaszczok plays with their materiality, using the malleability of paper to soften the concrete and metal forms they depict through cutting and rolling. In ‘Middle Ground (Wrap)’ (2024), a photograph of a chain link fence is cut out into a disconcertingly realistic, scaled paper version of the real thing. These photographs are combined with slabs of polystyrene, for example through wrapping, or rolling for use as a prop to raise off the floor, to create new, sculptural forms with a tension between perceived hardness and material softness.
Sophie Lee plays with scale in a pair of black-and-white photographs, ‘Open’ and ‘Closed’ (both 2024), displayed as large prints applied directly to the gallery walls, spanning their full height. A counterpoint in size to her small photographs assembled in the vitrine, they continue the thematic motif of windows, here in the frontage of a child’s playhouse pictured on a lawn. Displayed at opposite ends of the exhibition, the two works appear identical at both first and second glance. Eventually close looking (and some help from their titles) reveals that in ‘Open’, a door is slightly ajar, teasing the possibility of entry to this place of play. Lee also displays a text piece among her vitrine photographs, ‘Interruption Piece I’ (2025). As the title signifies, it is a transcription of the artist being interrupted by her child. As she attempts to dictate an excerpt from Ursula K. Le Guin’s ‘The Fisherwoman’s Daughter’, an essay on motherhood and writing, her work is halted by a sweet injection from her child, questioning what she’s doing and then going delightfully and imaginatively off-piste.
One can only imagine how many such interruptions have been encountered in the making of LULL. It’s an exhibition threaded with softness, care and close attention. An openness to embracing different ways of working permeates throughout: in the resourcefulness of turning the close-at-hand into subject matter, in the use of accessible media, in persevering with finding the ‘lulls’ in which to make work. The works here are united in their creation because of, rather than in spite of, balancing art with motherhood.
LULL, The Birley, Preston, 26 April – 10 May 2025.
Denise Courcoux is a writer based in New Brighton.
This review is supported by The Birley.
Published 09.05.2025 by Jazmine Linklater in Reviews
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