Do I merely multiply? (Mother) - Tori McLean

Royal College of Art
 
Do I Merely Multiply? (Mother)
Mixed Media Automaton - Charcoal screen prints, laser cut plywood & acrylic, UV printed plywood & acrylic, moon necklace, cord, wood, metal, and music box.
 
Built to half-life size to assert her agency, the Mother interrogates societal expectations that women exist primarily to reproduce. Surrounded by laser-cut babies in shifting hues and charcoal screen-prints of children, she links biology to social pressure. The use of charcoal, a carbon-based medium, in these prints’ grounds them in the shared substance of life, while DNA sequences and chromosome diagrams on her mechanism critique the idea that female worth can be reduced to biology alone.  
 
Her naked form recalls art-historical depictions of Venus, long idealised as eternally youthful, flawless and untouched. Here, tattoos and pubic hair subvert Venus to suggest that motherhood is contested terrain – one shaped by choice, circumstance and cultural judgment.  By disrupting the myth, the maternal body is reframed as equally beautiful, complex, and worthy of representation. 
 
The repetitive turning of the mechanism’s crank handle sets cycles of spinning babies in motion, echoing the endless, undervalued labour of caregiving and reinforcing how motherhood is too often reduced to a function of productivity and duty. In activating her, the viewer becomes complicit in sustaining these narrow definitions of female worth and identity. In this tension, the work questions why society continues to equate womanhood with motherhood, even for those who cannot or choose not to have children.