Living Seeds

Miriam Smaller’s exhibition presents a new group of works she has created in the last three years dealing with pregnancy as an aesthetic, symbolic and emotional subject matter. Smaller examines the woman’s pregnant body in its various stages. She chooses it as a point of departure for metamorphoses which constantly oscillate between the figurative and the abstract.

Through the usage of drawing, painting, etching and mixed media which combines embroidery and other materials, she examines the private and subjective aspect of pregnancy vis-à-vis its collective and public aspect. Concepts of the beautiful and the ideal vis-à-vis the grotesque, the humoristic and the ugly come together, allowing her to conjure up an entire set of cultural, social and spiritual connections. Alongside the external changing body of the woman, Smaller takes the observer inside, into the her body, to the embryo, which is in a state of continuous change from chaos to order, from non-shape to shape.

The works in the exhibition touch the tension between intimacy and exposure and between the inside and the outside which are at the heart of the pregnancy process. It suggests and probes the similarity between pregnancy and the work of art. The works unveil, in a variety of material and conceptual manners, the worlds between “self” and “other”, between life and death and between personal creation and cosmological formation.

Irena Gordon