Additional information
by Joanna Kirk (Artist)
Joanna Kirk's pastel paintings relate her experience of motherhood in which beauty is marked out against everyday reality to provide a new perspective on her work and life. Using her fingers to blend colours and build surface, much of Kirk's inspiration is drawn from the Impressionist painters Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt for whom domesticity was their given sphere, as well as later artists such as Louise Bourgeois for her ongoing revision of childhood experience. Many of Kirk's works isolate her children in natural landscapes, exposing their vulnerability and something of the dread and magic of fairytales in which children carry the weight of apprehension and that of their parents. In a frank interview with novelist Rachel Cusk, the artist discusses her fear of self-dissolution, and through the competition set up between creative work and maternal duty, the potential for self- identification in motherhood.
Author Biography
In 2003 Rachel Cusk was nominated by Granta magazine as one of 20 Best of Young British Novelists. Her latest novel is Arlington Park (2006). Cusk was born in Canada in 1967 and spent much of her childhood in Los Angeles before finishing her education in England. She is the author of six novels. The first, Saving Agnes (1993) won the Whitbread First Novel Award. Her other books include A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother (2001) and The Lucky Ones (2003).
