MOTHER!

MOTHER! takes the breast as a throughline to examine how femininity is constructed, inherited and lived across generations. Rather than defining a stable feminine identity, the project follows what passes from one woman to another: phrases, gestures, expectations, images and bodily traces. These elements do not replace one another in a linear progression. They accumulate, overlap and remain active within the same body, producing what the project calls a multiple woman.

The mother occupies a central position in this circulation, not as an absolute origin but as one link in a longer chain of transmission. She passes on attitudes and contradictions that she herself received from the women who preceded her. In Femme des années 80, phrases repeatedly addressed to the artist by her mother - “You will see when you become a mother,” “How will you ever be able to take care of a house and a man?”, “Never let men tell you what to do” - become sculptural assemblages of bras, mirrors, feathers and domestic objects. The bra appears as a social mould placed over an intimate and singular form. Across periods and cultures, it shapes the breast according to changing ideals of femininity, giving visible form to the expectations carried from one generation to the next.

The breast is where these social, cultural and emotional forces become body. Neither reduced to maternity nor to eroticism, it becomes a form through which the intimate enters a wider symbolic and public space. Across the project, skin, touch and the mother-daughter relationship move between the private body and collective images of femininity, while the microscopic scale of cells opens onto the vast scale of the cosmos.

In From Her to the Moon, childhood photographs of mother and daughter are recomposed with close-up images of skin, a breast and a hand reaching towards a lunar form. The surface of the body becomes a celestial landscape: skin resembles the moon, while the moon takes on the intimacy and texture of flesh. The maternal body appears at once close and unreachable, personal and mythologised.

Eclipse brings a photograph of the moon into contact with a mammogram of the artist’s breast. As one image gradually covers the other, the mythologised feminine body and the medically examined body coexist without either fully disappearing. The breast moves between flesh and image, intimacy and public representation, while the lunar eclipse becomes bodily and the body becomes cosmic.

This movement between scales reaches its most literal expression in Chimera, which draws on microchimerism: the biological phenomenon through which cells pass between mother and fetus during pregnancy and may remain within both bodies for decades. What appears invisible and microscopic gives material reality to the transmission explored throughout the project. Mother and daughter are not separate identities connected only through memory; each may continue to carry living traces of the other.

Across photography, sculpture and embroidery, MOTHER! moves from inherited language to gesture, from gesture to body, and from the intimate scale of skin and cells to the public and cosmic images through which femininity is imagined. The works do not describe a single passage from mother to daughter, but a continuous circulation in which several generations, models and contradictions coexist.

MOTHER! does not ask what femininity is. It asks how it moves.

A woman does not begin where her mother ends.

She emerges within what passes between them.