“Sensuous without a trace of coercive sentiment, embodied without burden, Amy Shuckburgh’s delicate yet bold and vivid images of motherhood manage to evoke a portrait for our time that avoids the twin pitfalls of idealisation and punishment.”
In the Bath, oil on paper
Motherhood: An Exhibition, Olympia Auctions, London
11- 17 February 2019
An exhibition of paintings and drawings by Amy Shuckburgh with sculpture by Arabella Brooke
An evening raising money for charity West London Action for Children, with writer Clover Stroud in conversation with Amy Shuckburgh, discussing motherhood and creativity.
Amy’s motherhood series explores intimate moments of motherhood, capturing in loose lines and vivid colour aspects of the serenity, exhaustion, stresses and pleasures of being a mother. These works look at the everyday physical and emotional demands of motherhood, and observing a world that has often been overlooked by artists; a private domestic realm where women are strong and yet frequently vulnerable and ignored.
Amy’s work challenges the traditional male gaze, with images of women’s bodies that are not idealistic or heroic but raw and truthful. As a mother herself, she has tried to explore what helps to create a woman’s sense of her own identity when she finds herself subsumed by her role as care-giver.
This series on women and children began in 2016, but draws on decades of portrait-painting, both of children and adults, and from a search more generally for a truth-telling and instinctive mark-making in her work.
