Subsidiary Projects is proud to present A WOMAN’S JOB IS NEVER DONE, french artist Emmanuelle Loiselle's  first solo exhibition.

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On her essay Motherhood Today, J. Kristeva states that a division occurs when pregnant; within a body there is another, and the individual female disappears to give birth not only to a child, but to a new mother. 

 

In this exhibition, the artist within the mother claims back its position, the female disappears, only to give place to the creator. Laura Mulvey defined the role of the woman as a ‘bearer, not maker of meaning’, this is why for artist Emmanuelle Loiselle, creating has turned into an act of resistance, a way of rebelling against a society that wanted to erase her individuality as an artist to transform her into the ‘perfect mum’. 

 

Her work is a representation of daily life, it focuses on the abject, and makes it beautiful in a playful and ‘poking fun’ manner. Through painting and installation,  quotidian objects are given new meanings and connotations. Her labour as a mother nurses her artistic practise, and vice versa. Paintings are expanding outside of their rectangular frames and sculptures are contained into plans and canvases. The artists juggles between personal and artistic life, priming and cleaning, stretching and feeding, days and nights… A woman’s job is never done.

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Emmanuelle Loiselle.  (b.1983, Lille) recently graduated from her BA in Fine Art from City and Guilds of London Art School where she received several prices for printmaking as well as the Chadwyck-Healey Prize for Painting. In 2017, Emmanuelle won the Collyer Bristow Graduate Art Award selected by Whitechapel Gallery Director Iwona Blazwick.

 

Recent group exhibitions include What Now at Candid Art Trust Gallery, Why Is A Raven Like A Writing Desk?, at Londonnewcastle Project Space, and Paper/Papier, which she curated alongside artist Samuel de Gunzburg. Her work has also been included in the Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair and the Clyde and Co Art Awards 2016.

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We can’t see what mothers hid 

for centuries.

I barely could walk without this 

terrible pain. 

I couldn’t stand, sit, or wash without bleeding.  

Body fluids of all sorts ran 

everywhere in my home.

Society could not care less. 

The loneliness was torturing me. 

The possibility of never going back to painting was an unbearable threat. 

Yes, everyday mothers are sacrificed 

on the altar of perfection 

because nobody wants to be seen as the 

bad mum.

 

One day she called me ‘Maman Peinture’

Neither categorisation nor separation existed anymore. 

I had finally become this hybrid creature that contains two, a priori, irreconcilable entities. 

Life at home and life in the studio 

formed just one, 

nurturing each other to create new poetic moments. 

The dirty and the clean became my language in this chaotic binary routine.

Create, destroy, clean, make up, wipe it all, start again, a woman’s work is never done.

 

Emmanuelle Loiselle