Cells and Love brings together the work of contemporary artist-mothers to explore the complex relationship between motherhood, care, identity, and artistic practice. Working across painting, sculpture, installation, video, performance, and textiles, the participating artists consider how becoming a mother can reshape our experience of the body, time, creativity, responsibility, and the self.

At the centre of the exhibition is the experience of matrescence—the profound physical, emotional, and psychological transformation that accompanies becoming a mother. Like adolescence, matrescence can be disorienting and expansive, bringing shifts in identity and perception that are at once intimate and universal. The exhibition moves beyond idealised narratives of motherhood, making space for its contradictions: tenderness and rage, connection and separation, joy and exhaustion, autonomy and responsibility.

For the artists involved, motherhood is not simply a subject or theme. It is a force that enters the studio and transforms artistic practice. It can alter materials, gestures, rhythms, working conditions, and ideas of productivity. The boundaries between studio and home, art-making and care, play and practice become fluid and often uncertain.

Cells and Love began with a series of book-club conversations between artist-mothers, initiated around Lucy Jones’s Matrescence. What began as a shared space for discussion developed into a collective desire to make visible the often overlooked realities of combining artistic practice with motherhood. The exhibition grew from this community of conversation, mutual support, and care.

The exhibition was curated by independent London-based curator Paola Lucente. Alongside core members Farnaz Gholami, Gal Leshem, and Michal Raz, Lucente invited additional artists to expand the conversation and create a broader reflection on the maternal.

While rooted in the experience of motherhood, Cells and Love extends beyond parenthood. It asks wider questions about what it means to create, to care, and to maintain a sense of self while being responsible for another. In bringing these experiences into view, the exhibition considers care not as a private or exclusively maternal concern, but as a fundamental part of how we live and make our worlds.

Artists:

Anna Frijstein
Charlotte Warne Thomas
Diane Chappalley
Emma Cousin
Farnaz Gholami
Fiona Chambers
Flora Bradwell
Gal Leshem
Hannah Morgan
Lindsay Mapes
Lisa-Marie Harris
Ludovica Gioscia
Michal Raz
Or Lapid
Qian Qian
Sophie Goodchild

Curated by Paola Lucente

Installation view of Farnaz Gholami Purple Room (2025) and Blue Hour (2025)