At the weekend I visited Glasgow’s GoMA (Gallery of Modern Art) to see the exhibition Unsettled Objects, featuring work from Glasgow Museums’ contemporary collections.
One of the works on display was seminal photographer Jo Spence‘s Being Mother, an image of herself posing as her mother slicing a loaf of bread – part of the ‘phototherapy’ method pioneered by Spence, who was a socialist and feminist. In her later years Spence also used phototherapy to work around her breast cancer diagnosis and subsequent illness.
The image gave me some serious food for thought. What sort of image might we each embrace if we wanted to use phototherapy to think about our relationships with our own mothers? What sort of actions, clothing, mannerisms or environments might be helpful in exploring our own parents’ lives and behaviours? Or, indeed, those of any significant people in our lives?
Jo Spence’s work ‘Being Mother’, part of the ‘Unsettled Objects’ exhibition at GoMA
Spence’s work appears again in a separate exhibition at GoMA, Peace at Last!, in which Kate Davis responds to items from Glasgow Museums’ collection. Metamorphosis (1992, Jo Spence in collaboration with Terry Dennett, now curator of the Spence Memorial Archive) is one of the most shocking and moving images I’ve seen. In it, Dennett followed Spence’s instructions to photograph her shortly after her death, with her face mirrored in steps and eventually forming a womb-like image of return.
For anyone interested in reading more about Spence, her autobiography Putting Myself in the Picture (Camden Press, 1986) is a great starting point.
Therapy In Cheshire 