Emily Joy
Mütterchen
pinhole photograph
2014
Mütterchen presents a series of women in an ambiguous state of vulnerability, dis-ease or rest, held by their young daughters. The children’s direct eye contact and posture positions them as both powerful and burdened mother-figures.
The series describes the weight of inheritance, examining heredity through a futural projection of care through the female lineage. Interpersonal, familial care is portrayed as a metaphor for wider societal inheritance.
Emily Joy (UK, 1982) is a socially and environmentally engaged installation artist. Underpinning her practice is an investigation into the subjectivity and loss inherent in remembering and reimagining; asking how experience is mediated by the imperfect copies of memory, language and image. Recent sculptural, installation, photographic and performative work draws upon personal, social and ecological narratives of loss, alluding to central-European histories of nostalgia, migration and exile. Her work examines how we write and rewrite personal narratives and social histories through what we inherit and what we erase.
