Rebecca Weisman

Mother Island (Part 1), 2024. HD Video and original sound, trt 15 min

Two children and their mother are stranded on an imaginary island and set out to explore two worlds: their own reenactment of pandemic lockdown set against archival footage of a 1960’s island shipwreck reenactment. A magical layering of truth and fiction unfolds replete with a fantastical cardboard house, a boat on wheels, and years of drawings and sculptures co-created by me and my children. In the world of Mother Island the viewer traverses an intertextual landscape of complex feelings about the isolation of motherhood, the creativity of surviving childhood, and the ethics of care for one another and the environment.

Mother Island is a three part project that operates as both moving image and sculptural installation. Mother Island pushes two boundaries simultaneously: that between moving image and object, and between the artist as singular creator vs caregiver creating within a communal and chaotic environment. Inspired by and utilizing everyday and domestic materials, Mother Island creates a lexicon of primary objects and actions. These objects and actions are transmogrified into ritualized totems, delineating a visual language of our earliest primitive relationships and memories.