Mya Cluff
The Bones Beneath

Emotional weight. Most women I know carry this like all of the shit we take out of the car, every time, unconsciously, dutifully and practically, though with deep bag lines creased into our palms. The loaded visual imagery of motherhood in art resurrects the emotional weight we carry with the scars of our encounters marked across our lifetime- with our mothers, grandmothers, aunts, female mentors, children. The changing societal expectations, feminist theories learned and forgotten, learned again through a different lens, then seared into our memory, and of course one’s shifting personal boundaries and capacity- it is all criss-crossed weathering of ourselves into the women and mothers we find ourselves becoming.

Mya’s recent work in The Bones Beneath depict motherhood with a nod to the structural supports. One infrastructure being the cradled pelvis, bearing the weight of pregnancy, another the nodular spine, allowing one to bend with suppleness to the child. These structures, the preconditions to our scars, are being aired out in the most literal sense, atop and jutting out of the sculptures, commemorated singly in charcoal drawings. The fur women, hatchmarked with a coat of lines are the aftermath of this weight. Taken together, mothering is clinical and metamorphic. Mya emphasizes maternal anxieties and fears of mortality, another woman may note the unforgiving load of expectation in the workplace and home, and yet another woman may note the nuance of being a fully independent human being, tethered to a concept and the physical role of motherhood.

In my time, nothing has put the thin line of life and death into higher magnification than the experience of motherhood. In loving and caring for my three children, I grapple both with living my best life for them, and understanding that all that we build together will come to an end. I came to the title of this exhibition, The Bones Beneath, in the intimate moments of holding my children, and feeling their delicate skeletons under the softness of their skin. A gentle reminder of their strength and vitality paired with the desolation of mortality.

The works in this show focus not on direct representation of my children and their natural frailty, but on creating physical representations of my own anxieties and fears. I lean on symbols such as the pelvis, or female figures abstracted by fur-like texture to create a space to hold sensitivity to maternal anxiety, and make an effort of finding beauty and strength within uncertainty. Bones, after all, are what hold us up.