amanda skye smyth
Bachelor of Fine Arts
Let Down
Motherhood is powerful. It informs my work intellectually and infuses story intricately. This installation is a love story for my daughter - Sylvie. Like most artists, life experience informs a work. The transition from individual womanhood into individual motherhood has influenced the way I create. Using textiles as a medium and the contemporary sphere of installation as a way to share the work is a portal for the viewer to gaze upon the inner workings of a mothers body, heart and mind - poetically. Diaphanous handmade felt 'peelings' become breast like vessels - translucent, full and not full - echoing the infants need for milk. Soft, humming, sweet scented beeswax drips from their ends, the uncontrollable and majestic maternal body. Upturned 'cups' spilling, waiting, emptied - an ever ending supply and demand , an unmeasurable marker. Twisted handmade paper string embedded with personal prose becomes a mothers songline of love to her child. It is a metaphor for connection, bond and links an ancient form of female textile workmanship - a call to that maternal state that brings woman from all cultures into a state of universal union. The pyramids of infant formula are a deliberate echo of the tantalising, aromatic, sensory attracting mounds spices of Asia and Europe. This is a baby's same response to a mother feeding. The experience of pregnancy and breastfeeding or bottle feeding - the extreme makeover it causes in a woman is temporal - 'Let Down' is an attempt at making memoir, embedding experience into a fabric, preserving moment. It is etherial, dreamlike, provocative and bodily. It is about Love.
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