"Rife with symbolic subject matter, Julie Curtiss' exhibition Maid in Feathers is a personal meditation on early motherhood and psychological transformation. In this new body of work, Curtiss explores the shadow-side of quotidian scenes in acrylic and oil paintings, graphic gouache works on paper and lacquered sculptures. A hybrid bird-figure appears throughout as a proxy for the self, a means by which the artist negotiates the existential drama of self-realisation that accompanies birth and motherhood."
"The painting Cradles (2025) is a diptych; one of its panels shows two mothers in flowing ivory dresses tending to black prams, while in its mirror, their places are usurped by two pelicans with curved, coal-black beaks. A gateway into Curtiss' wider body of work, Cradles stages an illusory metamorphosis: the maternal body becomes a chimeric creature and an everyday scene unravels onto a deeper psychic register, one of renaissance and becoming."
"Elsewhere, the monochromatic work on paper, Bassinet (2024), depicts the hood of a cot rippling gently in the breeze; demarcating another unseen space, the hood cloaks the child who sleeps on, out of sight. Here, themes of absence and transformation are foregrounded by the artist's interest in psychoanalysis, particularly Donald Winnicott's concept of transitional space: where inner world and external reality meet, and in which early psychic life unfolds."
Julie Curtiss presents a body of paintings, gouache works on paper, and lacquered sculptures centered on a hybrid bird-figure that functions as a proxy for the self during early motherhood and psychological transformation. The works stage metamorphosis, absence, and transitional space through imagery such as pelicans replacing mothers in mirrors and an unseen child cloaked beneath a bassinet hood. The exhibition links Christian and alchemical pelican symbolism to themes of self-sacrifice, resurrection, and becoming. The work interrogates the sexual politics of domestic and reproductive labour while deploying comic levity and psychoanalytic references, notably Donald Winnicott's concept of transitional space.
#early-motherhood #pelican-symbolism #psychoanalysis-transitional-space #domestic-and-reproductive-labor
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