JAYNE MATRICARDI: MOTHERSCAPE

Tired Mother
ink on voile, 60 x 90 inches, 2020

Several years ago I began to collect mother and child analog tintypes from the 1800s. Many of the photographs sit beneath a delicate paper frame which reveals only the child and covers the mother, on whose lap the child sits for the long exposure. One young mother in particular, hidden beneath a frame for perhaps a century until I found her, had a profound effect on my psyche and my art practice. I felt so connected to her. I felt I had shared her suffering, weariness, silence, and invisibility. I wanted to pay her homage and through her, pay homage to myself for the struggles I faced as a young mother. In my piece, Tired Mother (installed at the building entrance), I faithfully rendered the scratches, dust, and damage of the mother’s portrait, first as a large-scale graphite drawing on vellum - which I then printed on translucent fabric approximately 500 times the size of the original tintype. In my re-presentation and unveiling of this mother, bedraggled, raw, and vulnerable, I am not only revealing but re-asserting her presence that was supposed to have been hidden, ignored, overlooked.