AN AUDIO GUIDE TO SORRY ABOUT THE MESS
Scroll down to listen to each artist talking about their work
1. Series of 9 monotypes (2022), Chantal Powell
The work I’m sharing in this exhibition is a series of nine monotypes, hand finished with watercolour. They capture the energy and mess of alchemical transformation – a process I've been exploring through my studies in Jungian depth psychology and alchemical symbolism.
For me, the concept of mess in this exhibition is personal, in that I'm not just a mother, but also a woman, now entering menopause, another messy, transformative phase of life. Much like the massa confusa that you find in alchemy, which is a chaotic unformed substance that undergoes transformation, both menopause and motherhood are times of fragmentation and upheaval, but they're also powerful processes of change. They hold the seeds of rebirth and creation.
In these monotypes, I wanted to capture that energy of transformation. Organic forms merge with a laboratory aesthetic, human with non-human symbolising this integration of mind, spirit, and matter in the alchemical transformative process. Symbols like eggs, vessels, and breasts are all associated with incubation, potential and transformation. So, for me, these images are chaotic, messy, but exciting in their dance towards something new.
3 & 22. Spinning (2023); Lend me your ears (2020), Jacqueline Rana
Spinning is from a series of expanded paintings that explores the act of playing as a relational dynamic. I'm interested in the complex experience and sensation of early social bonds, how through forming collective knowledge, we come to understand and know each other. In Spinning, three figures hold hoops. They make small spaces in a shared, uneasy upside-down world. The conventional canvas support is removed. Acrylic paint and mediums on mesh support provide some stability, but it's precarious. The playground is a space for autonomy, but also a place to spontaneously commune. For me, the processes of making the work echo the sensation of playing: pools of paint, traces and stains that weave through figures and fill pauses of mesh giving shape to memory and collective skin. Painting off canvas – or extended painting – for me embodies the act of playing and allows a way to consider missing stories and to reflect on social forms and conventions through which we learn how to perceive and recognise each other to become aware of patterns of being into which we don't always fit.
When my daughter was growing up, I became captivated by her invented world of play. These spaces are strange, exhilarating, sometimes threatening. Listening to my daughter and her friend, I was reminded that these are spaces of profound connection. In a game she called setups, she and her friends created elaborate, invented worlds from animal figures, toy furniture, cardboard boxes. In fact, everything and anything was used to reenact versions of their everyday life and experience. I listened to their unraveling and reinventing events from their nursery primary school days where toy animals narrated a comic semi-rational sense of their world. Childhood experience mixed with half-understood adult rules.
The faces emerging in the work Lend me your ears are inspired by a vast collection of dolls and toy animals owned by a woman who creates setups in every room of her home. Her setups draw seemingly unconsciously on her experiences as a parent, grandparent and teacher – eerie dioramas that evoke the intensities of playing.
4 & 8. Di-Vision (2021); Barbara’s Milkshake Brings All The Boys To The Yard (2021), Holly Stevenson
Both Di-Vision and Barbara's Milkshake Brings All The Boys To The Yard are ceramic sculptures that comment on the maternal experience of breastfeeding, but from very different angles. Di-Vision could be read as a classical mother and child, one whose eye is a breast and whose breast is an eye. Barbara's Milkshake Brings All The Boys To The Yard takes the notion of breast milk as a fountain of knowledge, along with the concept of sculpture as something maternal. Its title uses Kelis’s lyric to pay homage to the work of Barbara Hepworth. I made both the works exhibited here during a moment that on reflection felt like motherhood was something in flux. I often felt the complexity of motherhood to be overwhelming and the early simplicity of being a needed breast was actually rather wonderful!
5. On writing The Song of the Whole Wide World, Tamarin Norwood
I am Tamarin Norwood, and I'm an author with a background in fine art. The last time I made a piece of art was before our baby son was born and died. That was in 2018. And the strange thing was that after his death, I really forgot how to make art, how to talk about making art, and why I had ever been making art in the first place. The book that I wrote that describes and interprets his very brief life is the piece of work that I've contributed to this exhibition, and it was written in the months leading up to his birth and in the months after his death.
The book carries on some of the very last trains of thought from my work as an artist. Just before he was born and died, I had finished my practice-led DPhil in Fine Art. And the central thesis of my DPhil was the idea that when you create something, you are sort of dredging to the surface, the kind of remnants of the creative idea that you had had but that in realising it and making it into a completed artwork, you are really diminishing and losing the very life of the thing that you were trying to create. And so the act of creation is resolved in the loss, in the death of the very thing that you were hoping to create. Many people have written about this idea. Virginia Wolf writes very beautifully about that feeling of having a thought that you can just about grasp draw up from underwater like a fish, but when you lay it on the bank of the river that thought is no longer full of life and full of possibility, but instead lies flat with its gills broken down on the bank.
And this was very much an idea that I'd worked through in my thesis, which looked ostensibly at the point of contact between the pencil and the page during the act of drawing. But as I was preparing for my Viva, I learnt I was pregnant and I learnt that the baby that we were expecting, that his lungs weren't developing. And sadly, although he was fine where he was in the underwater water world of my womb, he would no longer be able to breathe, and his lungs would diminish and fall flat, rather like the gills of a fish brought up into the air when he was born. And so, just as in my thesis, the act of creation would be resolved with the loss and the death of the very thing I'd been trying to create.
So this was a really striking coincidence for me, and it was a very confusing time when I was preparing my DPhil Viva because I was preparing for the examination of these ideas, but his birth was imminently approaching, and in fact, he was born and died five weeks after my Viva. I had planned to write a book about that analogy and that spell-binding coincidence, but as it turned out, that coincidence didn't really make it into the book. The book talks about other aspects of his very brief life and how we, as a family, interpreted that, but it does draw upon a lot of the conceptual frameworks that were building up in my PhD. I've not returned to art since then, but I think some of the dying embers of my work as an artist, which was a 15-year career making art, some of those embers are in the book that are on display in this exhibition. They say that a pram in the hallway is the end of creative practice. I don't think that's true, but I think it is striking that the loss of our son was the end of me making the artwork that I had been making for 15 years.
6 & 23. Pillow Talk (2025); Waffles (2024), Justine Hounam
I am Justine Hounam and I'm a visual artist. I make work that's about my lived experience as a single parent. My sculptural practice: I've developed a process which makes skins by casting furniture, using fabric and household paint. The furniture is imbued with memory of the home and represents the domestic. My filmmaking is about my family dynamic: living in a small housing association place with my adult child and grandchild.
7. 52 weeks (2025), Millie Walton
I’m Millie and I’m writer and the founder of Babe Station, an evolving art and research project which explores the relationship between making art and motherhood. Babe Station started as a personal project, a way of continuing to write and exploring what writing meant to me after my son was born. I wrote mainly on my phone, when I was feeding him in the middle of the night, or in the early hours of the morning. It was a way of staying awake and an attempt to capture the strange energy and disorientation of early motherhood. I posted these pieces of writing on Instagram paired with artworks that seemed to resonate with what I was feeling or writing about, personal photographs or sometimes my own drawings. I was interested in the immediacy and communality of social media, in the feeling of release it gave me to post words that were largely unedited, and in the way in which my writing voice changed as my son grew. 52 weeks is based on the text I wrote on his first birthday. I am deeply suspicious of language, especially when it is used to reduce or conceal experiences and identities. This is my attempt at creating an unstable text. It has been designed so that the words or phrases can be ripped off and rearranged.
9 & 10. a ghost (2025); sometimes momentarily, sometimes for years (2025), Anna Brook
Hi, I’m Anna. I’m a writer and a poet with a background in visual art.
The pair of works I made for this show, which are titled a ghost and sometimes momentarily, sometimes for years, take fragments of two poems of mine and combine them with altered photos that I took when my son was small.
The images are, in a sense, fragments of the main spaces we inhabited at that time – an endlessly messy domestic interior and East London’s pockets of green.
I’m really interested in how we find ways to talk about things that are difficult to express, and in these works I’m particularly thinking about the idea of the fragment as one way to approach that difficulty. I’m also always interested in ideas of haunting as another way to approach what might seem inexpressible, as early motherhood so often did to me. take fragments of two poems of mine and combine them with altered photos that I took when my son was small.
11. Kitchen scenes (2025), Rosie Reed
When I gave birth both times, once the baby had arrived, I was offered tea and toast, which is standard practice for new mothers in the hospital. So, my new life began with toast: it marked the beginning. Both times I threw it up. Sorry about the mess!
For this exhibition, I've made 14 sculptures that sit on a table of broken mirrors. Each sculpture erupts from a toaster, and each toaster has been found through Facebook marketplace and collected from homes in Margate where I live.
It's funny to be sharing these works in Meta's previous office space. I make sculptures a form of communication, and I'm interested in the ways that material moments might extend out of the power and limitations of language, everyday objects and the presence of the body. I believe that sculpture connects with our sentient selves, and with that, I don't want to be too prescriptive, but to say that I hope that these works connect with anyone who has duties of care for people, places, things and themselves. For me personally, these works speak of metamorphosis, constant change, claustrophobia, repetition, the sense of being split between places, love, wanting control, and wanting to lose it, domesticity, chores and the moments I notice the formal beauty and obscurity in my repeated daily interactions. When I was making these works, I thought about how if I say a word over and over, so many times over, it loses its literal meaning and that word becomes something bewildering and disorienting. I think the same goes for objects and the part that they play in the monotony of a daily routine.
12. Intermediacy (2025), Niamh Gordon
Hi, I’m Niamh. I’m a writer, researcher and editor from Manchester, and I’m part of the Babe Station team, assisting with the curation of ‘Sorry about the mess’.
This piece is called Intermediacy and it comprises four poems and a photograph.
The poems are part of a series I wrote in the first few months after giving birth, when much of what I was experiencing felt like it occurred beyond what my usual prose writing practice could accommodate. The texts are attempts at communication from a wild place, where the chaos, intensity and ambivalence of pregnancy and early postpartum are offered as normal and natural modes.
I’ve transcribed the poems using a typewriter where the paper release lever was variously raised and lowered. This lever controls the pressure on the typewriter’s feed rollers; when released the page moves around, guided by the motion of the typewriter keys. Letters, words and lines begin to meander across the paper, seeking a new path.
I invited my daughter, now two and a half, to draw or write on the typed poems; you can see her contributions in pink and blue ink and the occasional pencil scribble. In some cases she was attentive to the shape of certain words; in others she liked the white space.
I wanted this work to be collaborative, in recognition of her transformative presence, first in my body and then, after birth, in my life. My practice and perspective is radically new thanks to her. There is much freedom and creativity in this new state.
14. Matrescence brain (2025), Ludovica Gioscia
A pile of three-dimensional papier-mâché structures. The debris of previous layered wallpaper installations lean against one of the columns in the space. Above them, hovers of fabric work in the shape of a head. The textiles are screen printed with some of the patterns present in the debris below, suggesting a connection between the two bodies.
Titled Matrescence brain, the installation portrays feelings of disembodiment and chaos, which is simultaneously overwhelming and deeply creative, following the birth of my daughter Aria. At times I feel like my brains spill out from my head only to be clumsily tucked back in when Aria goes to sleep at night.
15 & 16. Curtain I (Untamed) (2025); Curtain II (Table Manners) (2025) Anna Frijstein
Painted with wild brushstrokes on a pair of black curtains, unicorn mum breaks free from the domestic. The work Curtain I (Untamed) is my response to the tapestry work from the late Middle Ages called The Captive Unicorn, who seems so happily constrained by the fence surrounding her.
Following this rebellious attitude, in the work titled Curtain II (Table manners), she leaves all her manners behind. She jumps on the table and starts shaking her many boobies up in the air with big grinning teeth. She tears apart the ribbon she once so sweetly wore around her soft neck.
Unicorn mum is one of my alter egos who reminds me of enjoying the good in being bad. To love being ‘a mother’, but who still remains her own untamed, animalistic being. She’s a renegading good ‘bad mum’ who doesn’t clean after her emotional mess. And no, she’s not sorry for the mess.
17. Everything you’re looking for is already inside you (2025), Amy Acre
I think most mothers, however joyful or challenging or beautiful or fulfilling or utterly exhausting their experience, will identify with the feeling of losing themselves in parenthood. It starts in the body, which not only becomes a home for someone else in pregnancy, but often, if we’ve lived through female adolescence and everything the world projects onto that, perhaps never really felt ours to begin with. After I had my daughter, the urge to reclaim and recover myself became strong and overpowering and loud. It led me to write my book, Mothersong, and to do things like stand on a stage in front of hundreds of people and read poems about my vagina. And sometimes this feels very silly, and very messy and very exposing. But I want the world my daughter grows up in to be one where women have ownership over their bodies, where we can embrace the mess, the chaos, the wildness and the flaws that make us fully human. The work I’ve created for this exhibition is called 'Everything you’re looking for is already inside you', and it’s an invitation for you – regardless of your gender, experience, whether or not you’re a parent – to climb inside yourself and really examine what’s there, and to do that with the same love and compassion that you might show a child. The work centres on a poem called ‘Atheism’, which is taken from Mothersong, and in many ways it’s the heart of the book: this search to keep ourselves alive, and to remember that the light inside you, however dim it might sometimes feel, is still there, waiting.
18. Always snack time (2025), Flora Bradwell
Always snack time sees two vagina dentata crow hybrid creatures the size of small children vie for your attention. They have been busy, laying a hoard of wailing boob-like spheres. Mouths open to emit noise perhaps or to receive a gift. This work reflects a sense of constant din, need, consumption and creation associated with cohabitating with soft-bellied children. The small mouths open in protest blur with the toothy labia open in expectation. Either way everyone wants a snack.
19. milk & blood (2025), Kiran Millwood Hargrave
Hello, I'm Kiran Millwood Hargrave. I'm an author with a background in poetry and for the ‘Sorry about the mess’ exhibition, I created a poem that I then had stitched by the embroiderer Rebecca Page onto a bed sheet that is stained with postpartum blood. milk & blood comments on the way that we are fed a lie of how motherhood should be. Clean sheets became an impossibility not only during my motherhood experience, but previous to that when I was trying to conceive my child. I, in fact, have several sheets covered in blood from miscarriages, periods that marked that I was not pregnant, and finally, postpartum blood. This postpartum bleeding was a huge shock to the system, but I'm glad to be able to share it here in a new form and to celebrate the mess our bodies make in creating new life.
20. Beast of Burden (2025), Jo Dennis
Beast of Burden, 2025. Clothing, rail, oil, acrylic, and spray paint, a coat, a dress, a pillowcase, tent, fabric, sand, rope, wire, and leather. The phrase beast of burden is used to describe a domesticated animal, like a horse or a donkey that is used for carrying heavy loads or to perform hard labour... This is a self-portrait.
24. The Fifth House (2025), Avni Doshi
I’m Avni. I’m a writer and I have a background in art history. I’m interested in the work of Carl Jung and have been informally studying astrology for more than a decade.
The work I’ve done for the show, entitled the fifth house, refers to the fifth house in the astrological chart which is said to rule children and creative expression.
The work began as a text which I wrote, the story of a mother/writer who faces the rupturing of identity, attention and consciousness as she negotiates how to be both things. I realised the text begins with a fall, and I’ve come to see it as a kind of descent story. A more mundane motherhood version of Inanna going to meet her own darkness.
I created a series of images - they’re works of digital collage - where the text was incorporated in various ways. The images are made up of photographs from my own archive, as well as fragments of alchemical images, renaissance paintings, and Hindu and Jain art.
Interspersed are line drawings and other markings to map the mother’s movement throughout a given day. The movement of her thoughts and her body. In this cosmological imagining, the planetary bodies and the human body reflect each other. I’m interested in movement and mess as archetypal phenomena.
25. Guardian/Guardians (2024), Sophie Goodchild
Guardian/Guardians is a work that mirrors the daily cyclical symbiosis of nurturing and nourishing two forms of living species. It exists as a physical sense of matter, a diaristic encapsulation of a repeated experience. It represents a personal need, yet repulsive desire for repetition and routine. The cosmic chaos of the internal mind that is shot with what I'm starting to realise are now insomniac traits: perfectionism, internalisation, obsessive worrying. There are motifs that guard my work and show up in the process of layering and fusing, natural biological and landscape phenomena that are both inconceivable reflecting this looming shadow that transcends this whirling state of being and the inescapable need to keep plates spinning.
We get up and feed the chickens every morning. We recently went through a stage of getting six to seven eggs from our ten rescue chickens. On average now, it is two, sometimes a surprise third. This work was conceived in the throes of early motherhood where creative inspiration ceased to tangibly exist anywhere other than forcibly finding pockets of what could be in the everyday mundane of caregiving. During this time, my son had started to feed the chickens with me in the morning. ‘Good morning ladies!’ he would say. There is always work to be done. The surprise third egg always ignites a fleeting spark of spontaneous excitement and hope for some continuation. This isn't something we hold onto: our ladies are temperamental.
26. The Empress (2018), Bea Bonafini
This armchair sculpture, made in collaboration with designer EJR Barnes, was made using a technique I often return to in my art practice: that of inlaid carpet, a more sculptural kind of tapestry making without the need of a loom or tufting fun. The title refers to one of the major arcana in a Tarot deck. In this case, the seat is empty, waiting for visitors to become the Empress archetype. A stoic and regal female figure sits on a throne, and is associated with motherhood and fertility, as well as creativity and nurturing. I welcome visitors to take this seat to rest, reflect or even feed their little ones, or simply a place from which to observe the surrounding artworks on show.
27. Night Visions I, II & III (2025), Bea Bonafini
My nights took on a drastically different turn as I stepped into motherhood for the first time. Working with bright colours on black paper, I made this series of drawings quickly and without overthinking the subjects. What came out was a series of bodies, some looking a lot like the Roman legendary symbol of La Lupa, the She Wolf. They nurture the earth, leaking milk, or try sleeping while containing another body.
28. Demodex Quilt (2024), Rosie Gibbens
Hello, Rosie Gibbens here. This quilt is made from sewn or photographed, digitally printed closeup parts of my body. I chose them because they were holes in the body, boundaries between the inside and the outside or otherwise parts that hint towards the digestive system. The marbled fabric also looks to me like blood vessels or maybe cells dividing up. The title is Demodex Quilt, named after a type of mite, which lives in hair follicles, usually on the face. Apparently they mate in our eyelashes. I wanted to make something luscious and ornate from things that are maybe private or gross or possibly abject.
29. Guessing & Movement in the Living Room (2025), Kate Briggs
Guessing & Movement in the Living Room is made from five posters, which together borrow sentences and an imagined choreography from THE LONG FORM, a novel I published with Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2023. The choreography is for two people: one holding and carrying, and the other being held and carried. I wanted to see if I could activate that movement in the real space of the exhibition, and particularly in relation to one of the windows. Visitors are invited to take one or more of the posters away so that the work continues to move.