Glass is new material in my artistic vocabulary and one with potent qualities. The amount and nature of the tension to which it is exposed determines how glass responds. It can withstand heat, take on a new form, crack, break, shatter,
completely flow away, change colour, become opaque or remain clear. It can be made flexible or rigid, sharp or soft-edged and it can be moulded over materials. Materials can be embedded into it and impressions left within it. Glass transcends the spaces between being solid and liquid, dangerous and benign, clear and opaque.
The quality of transparency in glass makes this a material uniquely able to contribute to the conversation about trauma, loss and grief through its ability to visually describe “the space between”: that impermeable space separating the individual from the “outside world”. Glass gives material form to feelings of being “in the world” yet separate from it, touched yet untouchable, present but not there. It is the space behind which every emotion, every response is held tightly in for fear of it spilling untidily over others.
The “space between” is a common feeling when in pain or experiencing grief; it is a physical and invisible space that cannot be transgressed. It provides a useful insight into the term “dissociation”, which describes the victim’s disconnect between mind and body in order to emotionally self-protect during a traumatic event. Although it may be a useful strategy for self-protection during the traumatic event, in its aftermath
emotional disconnection can be counterproductive.
The concept of “the space between” is one route through which I contemplate the enigma of the unavailable mother: the space between the child and the mother who does not see; the mother who fails to protect. The participants’ venomous attitudes towards the mother, rather than the abuser, were at first striking and unexpected. I was unprepared and perplexed to hear blame and vitriol being poured over the mother and not the man who was the perpetrator. The relationship between the mother and victim in a sexually abusive context is complex, the subject of considerable
investigation in the social sciences but beyond the scope of my thesis. Baker, Kendall- Tackett et al. and Featherstone, Finkelhor and Ricker, referred to earlier, do provide useful insights into some of the motivations that guide these vexed relationships. While I understand the theoretical work, as an artist I chose to investigate and respond to the women’s expressions of pain, loss and anger at the failures in this primal relationship. My artwork was an attempt to bring form to these feelings.
From within their deep hurt most participants could acknowledge some reasons, or at least offer some explanation, for their mothers’ failings; but few could forgive. The mother’s abandonment of the child to the other was not only a form of death to the child, it was viewed by some participants as death to their mother, and some admitted to going as far as conducting fake funerals for them. That these participants were unable to surrender their animosity towards the mother indicates how devastating the breach was, and how deep the resulting chasm between mother and daughter. As most of those flawed mothers are now dead, the possibility of any renewal or creation of a sound mother–daughter relationship has been fully extinguished and only bile and hurt remained.
The complexities that lie behind mothers’ responses and role in childhood sexual abuse is one area I would like to explore and understand further. However, here in my artwork, I simply responded to the participants’ pain of abandonment and the unavailability of their mothers. I puzzled over the collapse of certainty; how a child lives and survives in the realm of a mother who is incapable of providing the most basic care required. Embedded in my response is not the judgement, “How could you?” but the mystery, “Why couldn’t you?” What was missing? What had disabled that fundamental desire to care or to offer and enact care?
My ruminations upon the mother led to a range of artworks into which the mother’s immobilisation or unavailability is absorbed. They are a reflection on the mother’s stagnation of purpose, the petrification of appropriate mothering emotions and the loss of motherly guidance. Epi/dermis (Figure 20) references the mother in the ceramic dresses and in the glass, as it slumps over the dress and moulds to its shape, the barrier between the mother and the child, the impenetrable “space between”.
When glass melts over such a ceramic dress, especially one that has relatively high peaks and troughs, it can become too thin to cover it fully. Weak spots form. Small holes sometimes appear and fragments of the mother’s dress are exposed. These openings, faults to a glassworker, evoke uncertainty. Can these gaps in what was thought of as the mother’s impenetrability, imply it is opening or closing? Hopeful or hopeless?