'Hidden Mothers' takes its title and conceptual framework from Victorian-era photography, where mothers were concealed beneath draped fabric to photograph their children. This historical practice of maternal erasure became my point of departure for a sustained critique of idealised maternal iconography throughout art history. Shot in photo-booths around Melbourne in this series I appropriate the Victorian veil and transform it through painted fabric that renders the maternal body hypervisible rather than concealed. My torso becomes a surface inscribed with witches, washing machines, ravens, and clocks - domestic objects and mythic figures that constitute the visual lexicon through which motherhood is culturally inscribed. These loaded symbols form a counter-iconography that speaks to the materiality of maternal experience: its embodied labour, its corporeal presence, its dialectic of creation and erasure. – Ruth O’Leary
CCP.PE.ZINE is a collaborative publishing initiative from the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP) and Perimeter Editions, dedicated to providing a platform for emerging photographic artists to exhibit their work in an accessible zine format. Each zine in the series – launched periodically in pairs – focuses on a single body of work by artists selected by the CCP.
Ruth O'Leary is an artist based in Naarm, Australia. Her work explores maternal self-documentation – spanning gestation, birth, child-rearing, and aging – addressing art history’s systematic erasure of motherhood as lived experience.
32 pages, 14.8 x 21 cm, saddle-stitched softcover, Perimeter Editions x Centre for Contemporary Photography (Naarm/Melbourne).