Good Mom/Bad Mom. Unraveling the Mother Myth at the Centraal Museum Utrecht, explores diverse perspectives on motherhood. By challenging traditional portrayals, the exhibition dismantles the "good mother" cliché and deconstructs the myths surrounding motherhood by showcasing perspectives that have long remained unseen. Featuring works by Louise Bourgeois, Tracey Emin, Marlene Dumas and many others, the exhibition reveals the many facets of motherhood, care, and self-determination. Emma Talbot made Mother Earth, an installation and an animation specifically for this exhibition.
Emma Talbot on Mother Earth (2025):
'Installed in a totally green space, a metal structure (also green) covered in panels of painted silk. The ceiling panel, above the space, is a large Shee-la-na-gig, opening her vagina to reveal the universe - with a painted silk plant hanging down from her centre.
This piece of work considers a parallel between the mother and the planet. Both give life and offer the conditions that have the potential to care for life. Our planet - the space of our becoming, that hosts us, keeps us, supports us. The Terra firma that we imagine will always be there, will always provide for us. The mother, the one in whose love (whatever form that takes) we develop our own attachments.'
On the wall panels, the history of human attachments is described.
The uterus as vast as the universe, that holds our being in place. The multiplication of cells, extending outwards to meet the rest of life.
The gestational forms of developing foetuses etched into the walls of caves, the most ancient fossils that belong to our previous iterations before the human baby is fully realised.
The baby, born into this space and time.
Attaches itself to a body for its own survival.
This body nourishes and tends - it’s a metaphorical body, a societal body, a familial body. The body is described as a circle, a world- containing heart, brain, stomach, intestine, rectum. The body traps the baby in all of the tangles of learned attachments, hopes, fears, desires, expectations and shits it out as a fully formed adult.
On the other side of the space, adolescents fight on the ground/ brow of Mother Earth, trying to assert their independence and trashing their own earthly home in the process.
They are held by the belief that Mother Earth is a constant presence, whose care can be stretched to the limit. The work reflects on our troubled relationship with our own planet, with our own nature.
‘Imprudently, a margin of tolerance has been well and truly exceeded’
Curated by Laurie Cluitmans & Heske ten Cate