About the Show

Reclaiming Motherhood: I Will Not Vanish

Holly Parson Nielsen

In this show, I visually communicate my story through the lens of a fantastical world where a main character journeys towards self-awareness as she shapeshifts, crosses thresholds, and transitions into her own sense of motherhood and personhood.  Storytelling is at the heart of who I am as an artist.  In choosing to place my show in the format of a narrative, I’m creating a buffer for the audience to experience my story.

Much of the content of my show is a creative dialogue exploring the trauma of my introduction to motherhood, where I dealt with the severely premature birth of my son. Throughout, you will see recurring motifs of lines, circles, curves, roots, and anamorphic changing. 

One of the primary themes of my show is shapeshifting; physically, emotionally, and mentally transitioning, changing form, being fluid, and finding resilience. I explore the disparities within the theology of my religious upbringing in the Mormon church, which taught me about a father-god who had many names and whose visual identity was extremely important. At the same time, I was taught that I also had a mother-goddess who was nameless, faceless, and absent. We were not allowed to speak to her, and she did not speak to us. I felt that absence acutely.

Uncovering the content of Reclaiming Motherhood meant turning to the women I came from, researching what life was like for women in my maternal lineage, which is Celtic and European. My research included a guided study with Dr. Isabel Moreira in which we explored these themes in the Middle Ages and Medieval times, including writings by historians, hagiographers, archaeologists, anthropologists, and osteo-archeologists. I was fascinated by the similarities between my experience and the faint traces of these women. In addition, I found myself compelled to reclaim tropes from Irish lore for myself, with a focus on the Morrigan and the Dearg-a-daol beetle, two characters who appear throughout the show.

Again and again the concept of symbolic annihilation surfaced, understood here as the absence of representation or the under-representation of a group of people in a social context. I am not trying to represent “the feminine perspective” within my culture, as though that were singular. Rather, I hope that my story adds to a growing diversity of female perspectives within the social circles of my upbringing.

In my process, I used compressed charcoal with acrylic washes and glazes on large gessoed Masonite boards (44” by 66”). To complement the dominant use of charcoal and lines I’ve used a limited color palette. Though the colors are few, each represents its own meaning: blue and purple, an ever-constant presence and/or isolation; yellow, the energy of life; orange, the growing power of the main character; and green, the main character’s core of personhood. The acrylic washes and glazes allowed me to create fluid forms and values with color.

Because I felt the threat of vanishing, I embraced a process of applying rubbings and direct marks of charcoal, then erasing out the charcoal to represent the erasure that I felt. This resulted in layers that lend themselves to an eerie and alluring environment. What emerged is, I believe, an engaging self-portrait that explores a more complete representation of my experience with motherhood.

Thank you for attending my show virtually. I hope you find an engaging connection with these images and stories.

Holly Parson Nielsen