Catherine McCormack

In Latin, the word ‘mother’ (‘mater’), comes from the same root of the word as ‘matter’ and ‘material’. To be of a mother then is to be part of the material fabric of the world.

It might be useful to return to John Berger’s Ways of Seeing here and his suggestion that the female nude in art history displays: ‘her nakedness not [as] a function of her sexuality, but of the sexuality of those who have access to the picture’. In other words, her sexuality is relative to an implied owner.

there may be those who want to possess her, or those who want to emulate her, but what does this say to those who see nothing of their desires in her? And how does the woman spectator of these bodies separate her own desire and sexuality from the archetype that has been modelled for her – especially when it is one that is to be understood in relation to an owner?