Disrupted Icons (The Maternal Gaze)

Disrupted Icons (The Maternal Gaze) is the result of a 6 month collaboration between visual artist Lucy Cade and sound artist Eleanor Turner. Their work questions and celebrates modern motherhood, stressing the necessity for reinvention alongside traditional or religious expectations of ‘Mother and Child’. The starting point for the project was the opening ‘Chapel scene’ of Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Nostalgia. The project deep-dives into religious iconography, combined with references to the artists’ lives: in particular, Cade’s work is filtered through the trauma of her own experience of postnatal psychosis. Turner’s soundscape samples birdsong (referencing the Tarkovsky scene and the associated symbology of birds) and her harp playing in a sonic exploration of what it means to be a mother today: heartrate monitors play alongside the creative sounds of Cade’s studio. A feast for the eyes and ears, the show will appeal to all ages and genders.