In Maker + Mother, artists explore the tension between creative identity and motherhood
Parker Street Gallery exhibition features works by 10 artists, including co-curators Felicia Fraser and Emiko Mizukami
Dominique Walker’s oil painting Sunlit Mornings.
Felicia Fraser’s oil painting Balloons 2.
Parker Street Gallery presents Maker + Mother from August 16 to 30
ONE OF FELICIA FRASER’S favourite parenting hacks is to occupy her kids’ attention with balloons. Bored? Blow up these colourful ones from the dollar store and bounce them around the living room. Upset? Admire this cute heart-shaped one filled with helium. In Fraser’s own words: “Everything around balloons is simple, straightforward, and pure joy.”
So it’s fitting that the spheres became inspiration for the Vancouver-based artist’s cheery new oil paintings, aptly titled Balloon 1 and Balloon 2. Sunshine-yellow balloons are adorned with the classic smiley-face design, surrounded by reddish-pink and cobalt-blue counterparts. The two pieces will be on display from August 16 to 30 as part of the Parker Street Gallery group exhibition Maker + Mother, which Fraser co-curated with Emiko Mizukami.
“I’m into painting shiny and reflective things these days—that bright, happy, colourful side of childhood,” Fraser tells Stir by phone, on a break from painting a mural in Jericho. “I filled a room in my house with balloons, blew them up, shook them all around, and took a bajillion photos trying to get some interesting arrangements and reflections. The two paintings that you’ll see came out of that.”
Maker + Mother features paintings, fabric pieces, and sculptures by 10 artists who reflected on what motherhood means to them within their creative journeys. Alongside Fraser and Mizukami, they include Laura Clark, Lisa Farrell, Alex Maertz, Marisa Myrah, Shannon Pawliw, Laura Rosengren, Shari-Anne Vis, and Dominique Walker.
Felicia Fraser.
The works represent all the achievements and hardships that come with being a mom. Walker’s oil painting Sunlit Mornings, for instance, depicts her little boy taking a bath in the kitchen sink, looking happy as can be as he plays with measuring cups. Soft brushstrokes capture sunshine spilling onto the scene from a window in the backdrop. “Everyone’s bathed their kid in a sink at some point,” Fraser muses, adding that Walker “captures the light so beautifully”.
The two artists’ ties run deep; when Fraser was studying graphic design and illustration at Capilano University, Walker taught her a branding class. Since then, with the influence of motherhood, both women have become full-time painters. Another exhibiting artist, illustrator and abstract painter Maertz, studied in the same program as Fraser at CapU, and babysat Walker’s children for a while. For Maertz’s piece Beautiful Chaos, she let her young children add flourishes of their own to the canvas.
“Motherhood has really shaped each woman to be who they are now, and that is expressed so uniquely in their artwork in so many different ways,” Fraser says. “It’s all the things. It’s the tension of figuring out who you are while you’re also a mother, and where you fit in that—your own identity, your own style, your own artwork.”
Fraser spent much of her career in graphic design while raising her kids, who are now nine and 11. Since pivoting to painting full-time a few years ago, her work has been the centre of two solo exhibitions: 90s Kid at Slice of Life Gallery, and Make. Believe. at THIS Gallery and Place des Arts in Coquitlam. Maker + Mother is the first group exhibition she’s curated.
Laura Clark’s Rolling Pin and Hot Water Bottle, hand-built ceramics from her “Everyday Objects” series.
Alex Maertz’s Beautiful Chaos, acrylic and mixed media on canvas.
“What’s so great about this exhibition is that each one of us is so wildly different from the next,” Fraser says. “So you will see everything celebrated about motherhood, from the beautiful little moments to figurative paintings of actual children.”
That includes multimedia artist Clark’s three-dimensional Hot Water Bottle and Rolling Pin, hand-built ceramic pieces from her collection “Everyday Objects”. For Maker + Mother, she chose items that were meaningful to her relationship with both her mom and her own kids. Among the other clay objects she’s sculpted are a box of chocolates, a tennis ball, and a roll of toilet paper.
Folks who want to meet the artists behind the exhibition can drop by the Parker Street Gallery on August 23, where a handful of them will be onsite to chat about their works; or attend the closing reception on August 30. Both events run from 11 am to 3 pm.
“I really want people to come in and just feel motherhood in all of its facets,” Fraser shares. “I want them to come in and be floored that this is varied and diverse and just absolutely wild and full—and yet beautiful as a whole. You can dive deep, and there’s details, and there’s tension between some of the artworks that are different, you know? Not all parts of motherhood are beautiful and nice. I don’t want it to be a big white gallery with the occasional painting; I want it to feel full-on and wild.” 
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