COMFORTER: OLIVIA DE FLEURIOT, LAURA ROSENGREN, SARAH VAN SLOTEN

The Fort  Gallery is pleased to present Comforter, a group exhibition by artists Olivia de Fleuriot, Laura Rosengren and Sarah van Sloten.  This exhibition is part of the gallery’s four-part series, Making Home, which invites reflection on our changing relationship to the domestic sphere.

An exploration of motherhood and the domestic space, Comforter brings maternal life into the gallery, carving out space in our public life and politics for a maternal ethic of “care, nurturing, connectivity and growth.”  Throughout the pandemic we have seen women’s careers disproportionately affected, in part because of limited childcare options and the fact that child-rearing roles still routinely fall to women. Comforter explores how this ethic of care and nurturing might transcend the domestic sphere (and the temporal limits of the pandemic) to penetrate public life.

The three artists bring diverse perspectives, as well as material and aesthetic qualities to their inquiry into motherhood.  De Fleuriot’s work is concerned with the maternal body and domestic labour, referencing the intimate connection between mother and child through soft sculptures.  Rosengren’s drawings and paintings examine the rituals and rhythms of motherhood, attesting to the state of constant interruption that characterizes life with young children.  Van Sloten’s work presents a playful and abstracted yet intimately familiar narrative, drawing on the iconography of childhood.  Gendered materials and processes associated with domesticity are used to challenge patriarchal notions of work and to articulate the difference between visible and invisible labour.