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“I’m interested in showing the joy of life, and at other times, I feel I want to depict the terror of life... My series of paintings Bringing Home Baby show babies meeting with cultures that are quite idiosyncratic. The settings of the paintings are strange. The absurd, dream-like qualities of these settings evoke the strangeness of the new worlds for the babies. Life is getting complicated…”
– Violet Costello on her series Bringing Home Babies
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Touch Him is currently on view at Cromwell Place as part of the Mother Art Prize exhibition.
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The work of Violet COSTELLO, winner of the 2020 ‘Procreate Project – Mother Art Prize Online Award,’ is inspired by the complexities of the human condition: our quirks and familiarities, our moments of loneliness and moments of joy, the ways in which we identify and represent ourselves in and to the world. With a practice incorporating painting, sculpture and installation, Costello explores the home, familial relations and society's ability to shape identity. A common thread in much of her work has been the consideration of children's world of play, a realm where reality readily gives way to, and is confused with, imagination – as can be seen in her ambitious series Bringing Home Baby.
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“Among 626 entries from 45 countries, selected by an incredible line up of judges, Violet Costello was the undoubted winner of Mother Art Prize 2020 Online Award. Violet’s works reimagine figurative art into an engaging new language that combines imagination, play and the grotesque. Costello offers interesting new narratives around the idea of family, care and socio-cultural imprints. As directors of an organisation that promotes and investigates themes surrounding the maternal experience and identity, Violet is definitely an exciting discovery”
– Dyana Gravina, Founder and Creative Director, Procreate Project
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The paintings in Bringing Home Baby depict the meeting of innocent babyhood with prevailing, if idiosyncratic, culture. In each work, a baby is confronted by the foreign and intensely detailed culture of a family home: Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch on the floor or the 1970s American sitcom Flying Nun on TV; two men happily knitting; a sunburnt dad barbecuing; a bejewelled mom sunbathing; a blue teen in angst; a tattooed mother in a swim cap; and a buttoned-up father in a monkey hat. The walls are hung with art: a Basquiat, a black velvet nude, a Klimt, a bullfighter. The Surrealist quality of these domestic scenes evokes the strangeness of a baby’s new world and is suggestive of the complex processes by which culture defines and imposes the identity that will shape a baby’s life.
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Violet Costello: Bringing Home Baby
Past viewing_room
