The ProCreate Project, the Museum of Motherhood and the Mom Egg Review are pleased to announce the 32nd edition of this scholarly discourse intersects with the artistic to explore the wonder and the challenges of motherhood. Using words and art to connect new pathways between the academic, the para-academic, the digital, and the real, as well as the everyday: wherever you live, work, and play, the Art of Motherhood is made manifest. #JoinMAMA
July, 2018 Art by Sophia Marinkov Jones, words by Sherine Elise Gilmour
Art by Sophia Marinkov Jones
The works are from a series that reflect different moments in a day as a mother and child interact. These drypoints required firm pressure to engrave lines into perspex sheet before the inking and printing processes. This firm contact is essential for the lines I make, which are scratched or rubbed into a surface.
More About the artist:
Since the birth of her son, Sophia’s work has explored how identity is forged through family experience. She often makes drawings on the floor with her son present and his energy drives the process. This dynamic developed thanks to Procreate Project’s Mother House, where she was invited to work alongside her son in a shared studio space. She is interested in the gestures that are exchanged between mother and child and the deeper psychological impression (and disturbance) that a child makes on an adult and how this is managed and returned back to the child. Her line works to express the immediacy of a moment and rising emotion, and to capture these tangled states before they are lost.
Previous works explored landscape and conservation. She studied Architecture at The Bartlett, UCL and has an MA in Printmaking from the Royal College of Art, London.
Words by Sherine Elise Gilmour
Sad Animals
Draw a sad rabbit you said.
And I did. This is what we used to do. Each night for weeks. Construction paper. Pink, yellow, blue. You would tell me what to draw and what to write, because you did not like the way the marker felt in your hand, pressed to your palm.
Draw a sad elephant. Draw a sad cow. Make him cry. Draw a sad frog.
Draw a sad squirrel.
Draw a family of sad rabbits. Write “sad rabbit family.” No no no, they’re sad, they’re sad. You cried and demanded when I tried to give an animal a smile. No no no. They’re not happy, they’re sad.
Originally published in Mom Egg Review vol. 16 Mothers Work/ Mothers Play
Sherine Elise Gilmour graduated with an M.F.A. in Poetry from New York University. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming from Green Mountains Review, Many Mountains Moving, Oxford University Press, River Styx, So To Speak, Tinderbox, and other publications.