Mother Mother

Artists:

Pam French

Leni Shilton

Two sisters, an Artist and a Poet

In this evocative & moving exhibition visual artist Pam French and poet Leni Shilton, explore the cycle of life-long female relationships and links between generations long passed. 

Mother Mother explores the relationships of mothers and daughters through images and words.

Pam French and Leni Shilton are sisters and artists working in collaboration. They have worked together over many years and have collaborated in two previous exhibitions.

Their work explores the experiences of life and the creative threads between their work. Despite the work being created in isolation from each other, the visual images and poetry sit alongside each other with an ease and familiarity that comes from their family threads, their shared values.

Viewers will be able to explore the work through a multimedia experience – artwork, projected images, audio, written and spoken word. This exhibition will be highly accessible and interactive. Not to be missed!

Leni Shilton:

Leni is a writer and educator who has recently moved to Newstead after living in Mparntwe | Alice Springs for many years. She has worked in bush nursing, prison education, tertiary education, and in domestic violence community development work. Her poetry and academic writing have been anthologised in Australia and internationally and her poetry regularly appears in literary journals. In her award-winning books Walking with camels and Malcolm she offers a dynamic and innovating way to explore stories in verse. Her writing focuses on the power of writing landscape and place in poetry and giving voice to the unheard, the silenced, and exploring issues of mental health and depression. Her literary and professional careers have coalesced with a focus on supporting and enabling people to tell their stories. 

from Inside my grandmother – Leni Shilton

Hidden deep,

the research tells me,

are my sisters and my brother

and I,

we are in my mother,

and she is inside my grandmother.

I am an egg not yet known

to itself.

Nestled, warm, and safe,

waiting.

Pam French:

Pam lives south of Sydney NSW works as multidisciplinary artist. Her studio situated in remnant Cumberland Plain Woodlands alongside a dry swamp. Her ongoing fascination with the wonderful diversity of people, places and nature is the source of inspiration in her work. Over the years this creativity has been a powerful force that moves her through life. Her work encompasses the response to the shifts of thinking in drawings, paintings, prints and sculptures studies in clay, sometimes to bronze. Pam travels to research new landscapes, regularly returning to those of significance to her.  This informs and energizes her work.