Artist Statement

‘Since she was born time has moved exponentially. Her baby feet are now almost as big as mine, her clumsy ways turn to grace. For one brief moment, she is suspended in animation as time distorts the water around her’.

Artist Bio

Amy Marshall is a portrait artist whose work explores the shared experience of modern motherhood. Although her portraits are predominantly of children, it is important to note that they are children viewed through the artist’s maternal gaze. Her work is as much about motherhood as it is about children. Often her portraits offer an element of absurdity. This on the surface, comic relief masks the underlying ache and loss that are part and parcel of parenting.

In her photographs, dark backgrounds become shorthand for worries and emotions, and light backgrounds are synonymous with hope and aspiration. Her pieces offer the viewer a visual spectrum of modern motherhood: the beauty, the fear, dark moments and good times, the guilt, the adoration, and the whisper-quiet moments in between. The artist’s children appear in many of the pieces, sometimes as themselves but sometimes as actors playing a part to express border themes or emotions.

In the early days of her motherhood, the artist would obsessively photograph her children as a coping method, a creative output that would allow her a fleeting moment out, in the non-stop chaotic days she found herself in. It was, and remains important for her to capture honest, everyday moments, as too quickly these moments are gone.