2025, Mom ArtSpace, Raleigh, NC
Mom, 2025
ArtSpace, Raleigh, NC
STATEMENT BY: ANNAH LEE, CREATIVE DIRECTOR
Motherhood is at once a familiar and an entirely foreign experience. Rooted in our personal histories with our own mothers, taking on the role of “Mom” conjures comfort, tenderness, and love, entwined with pain, grief, and trauma. The complexities of motherhood are the focus of figurative ceramic sculptor Andréa Keys Connell’s work in her exhibition, Mom. Connell’s work and her process are reflective of her own experience of motherhood, full of contradictions, chaos, and care. For Connell, “each piece is a renewed effort to express the nonverbal, universal experience of motherhood—that tender, intimate space where the agony and ecstasy of loving a child coexist, seeping into every aspect of the world around me.” In the work, cherubic figures and nursery rhyme-like animals whose surfaces are enlivened with a cheerful palette, evoke the sweet images of motherhood found in art of 18th century France. Yet, the sweetness of Connell’s figures is cloaked in discomfort, highly patterned surface designs often distort or camouflage the figures whose topsy-turvy positions create the illusion of instability and potential collapse. These stylistic choices challenge the saccharine subjects and speak to the ways that our awareness of our own fragility and shortcomings can be heightened in the presence of children. For many artists, process can be upended by the day-to-day realities of parenting which are filled with periods of both tedium and unpredicted urgency. Connell has made these challenging circumstances work within her practice. She says of her earthenware clay body, “This material allows me to build quickly and honestly, leaving little room for refinement. I work in bursts of energy with fast-paced intention, between life’s interruptions. The urgency of my process reflects the beautiful messiness of motherhood itself.” The work on view in Mom is a testament to an artist’s dedication to their work and an intimate glimpse into the ways in which art and motherhood can triumphantly inform one another.