Jacinta Maude (Australia)
Title:Latent
Medium: Repurposed household linen, silk and cotton, organic materials, cotton thread
Size: 21 x 29cm
Price: AU$50
The work Latent explores traumatic memory through fragmentation and material traces. The artist is interested in traumatic memory and family secrets held tight and revealed as invisible psychological burdens.
Working with everyday materials commonly found in the family home, the artist has taken a swatch of linen, once a complete table-cloth tasked with protecting furniture from damage, and reduced it to a stained remnant. Like a sampler of residual marks, the work reveals tints like unhealed bruises endlessly appearing as well as acts of repair, outlines, cover ups, and spaces where something has been removed. The marks reflect the signs of something hidden and something new – pointing to a dynamic between obfuscation and outlines of healing. Elucidating an evocation of loss through the burden of secretes held tightly, the artist discovered a process of identification as a pathway towards potential resilience.
Maude is a multidiscipline artist, her practice combines painting, photography and the moving image to explore themes of traumatic memory and domesticity. Her inspiration is grounded in her daily experiences and she intertwines her role as mother and artist.
The eternal stress of time and the persistent need to do many things force her to exploit herself, and her role as a caregiver. Maude often shows herself in the work to ground it in reality and to reflect her frustration with socially constructed expectations of motherhood and feelings of failure if these constructed expectations are not met.
Maude uses basic domestic materials, ready-made, or repurposed – very often they are personal objects from her family home. She’ll capture her everyday activities on video, which she projects or places within installations.
Her works are concerned with psychological burden. She uses mundane, everyday domestic chores as a reference for the often-invisible mental load carried with care giving and traumatic memory. The overwhelming, repetitive physicality of the everyday acts are shown through slow motion, looped footage projected onto household objects such as an up-turned table. She includes jarring sound recordings taken from her home – the washing machine on spin cycle, the motor whirring and clicking to a halt plays while dirty washing lays on the floor in a piled heap. Recently the artist has incorporated remnants of soiled household linen into her practice to explore the notion of repair and resilience.