Through the Mother

A new University of Queensland Art Museum exhibition, Through the Mother, will explore how visual design, touch, taste and smell can shape our most poignant and powerful memories. Artist Elizabeth Willing said that an intimately conceived space reconstructed from her memories and impressions of her mother are the centerpiece of Through the Mother. The architecture of the space invites viewers to enter a fragmented narrative that is pieced together by the artist through things that are familiar—a table, a stool, tea, wallpaper, a shed—but rendered strange by wax and bush, grease and hibiscus, valerian and patchouli.