Exhibits,
Madeline Bishop Without your mother
Dates: 22 June - 17 July 2021
Without your mother considers the nature of absence within maternal relationships. An absence is a state or condition in which something expected, wanted or looked for is not present. We begin our lives looking for our mothers. Do we ever stop looking for them and do they ever stop looking for us? As we grow, we make attempts to detach ourselves in order to become independent and live adult lives. What remnants of this relationship that defines our early lives remain in the distance of adulthood? Amid absence, our memories morph, the details become duller and distorted over time and we’re left with a summarised version of what might have happened, similar to a photograph. Some edges will blur and some will sharpen until those are the only parts we can remember.
Madeline Bishop is a photography and video artist based in Melbourne, Australia. Bishop’s work is conceptually centred around relational dynamics. Exploiting the persistent tension between distance and closeness in photographs, Bishop’s work uses a performative and constructed approach to dissecting the relationship between photography and intimacy. Bishop is a Master of Fine Arts graduate with First Class Honours from the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne and has been a finalist in a number of prizes, most recently the Alane Fineman New Photography Award and the National Photographic Portrait Prize.
