PARENTHOOD

The Gallery at Green & Stone, 251 - 253 Fulham Road, London SW3 6HY (MAP)

21st September - 1st October 2022, 10.00–17.00

Parenthood collates three years of work, all centred on the universal subject of family. I attempt to portray the intimacy of the early years through uncompromising and compelling studies of new life, drawing particularly on the apprehensions and fragility of parenting.

Many of the 75 pieces depict small infants asleep. We are allowed this tender moment when the sleeping child is completely unaware of our presence, cocooned in warmth and safety. Through my work, these intimate studies become enduring images for families to cherish for years to come.

Similarly, each painting of my own family and children has been an opportunity for me to gift us time we spend together, helping me treasure this brief period, encouraging a positive psychological journey and cementing my bond with each. Through this body of work, my intention has been to illustrate the significant importance of the early years in our daily lives by highlighting our shared experience and the inherent relatability of infanthood.

In the self portraits and the woman-and-child compositions I attempt to challenge the precedent that reduces a mother’s existence simply to her function, instead offering other facets, including displays of maternal trepidation and mental conflict, questioning the nature of responsibility, womanhood and guardianship. In the three self portraits, I examine feelings of foreboding, eagerness and physical depletion, with the fractured “Pregnancy in Two Parts” playing on these conflicts especially.

The rawness of “Three in a Bed” lays bare the duality of the mother’s exhaustion and constancy- a familiar scene to parents - and the exposition of the mother’s unique vulnerability is continued in “Breastfeeding in the Garden” and the various bath nudes.

In “Parenthood”, I invite the viewer to journey beyond the traditional remit of motherhood, developing conversations around the mother-figure, by capturing familiar moments, both fraught and tender. My approach to painting centres around my interest in mark making and colour theory. Artists such as Alice Neel, Chantal Joffe and Susanne du Toit have made a great impression on my work, notably in their compositions and the intention of their mark-making. I have really enjoyed the brush work and the decisive movement in their work, which is the antithesis of saccharin - an approach rooted in reality, which I find so endearing.

Elizabeth Shields’s new body of work is the fruit of an extended period when almost everyone experienced, to a greater or lesser degree, the social confinement brought on by a global pandemic. Confinement is also an antiquated word still used occasionally to describe childbirth and the period that follows when a mother traditionally withdraws from the routine obligations of the world to recuperate and bond with a new baby. Shields has taken a period of obligatory home confinement to reflect upon the experience of pregnancy and maternity in a series of monotypes, oil sketches, and finished paintings. While her masterful studies of human flesh, of newborn hair, and of sheets and blankets call to mind the lessons of Lucian Freud, and her bold drawing of figures the example of Alice Neel, Shields forges her own path. Her sensitivity to the depth of the maternal experience sets her apart in these unsentimental representations of infants and the rituals of their care. They recognize a mystery in human infancy with its absolute reliance on a mother and its strange contrasts of vulnerability and assurance, alertness and repose. Shields treats it all on its own terms without reproach and has created an impressive series of pictures that celebrate the power and beauty of nurturing.

Matthew Hargraves, Director

Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art