The smell of sweet decaying strawberries was the first thing one noticed when entering Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill’s exhibition “M*****.” The scent immediately connected me to emotional, nonverbal memories in my primordial being. The gallery’s contents were deceptively sparse, much like the show’s title: a letter followed by five stars signifying the word mother—a noun, a verb, a role . . . an infinite galaxy of things. Hill has an incredible gift for interweaving everyday found materials in ways that speak poetically, symbolically, and associatively. She exposes the fallacies in contemporary value systems to reveal ways of knowing that are ever present. Here, the artist deepened her explorations into motherhood, unraveling stereotypical notions and limitations of the term within late-capitalist white heteropatriarchy. Dismantling Western sense hierarchies where, as she describes, the visual “elides the truth, the context, the lived truth,” her art bypasses the rational brain, connecting directly to our olfactory memories. Like previous sculptures that employed fragrant tobacco, an Indigenous material of reciprocal exchange that predates capitalism, Hill’s work here allowed us to breathe in and access all that came before.
What is the immeasurable value of mothering, if not of building care structures that make possible the entire world: an alternative system that came long before colonialism and capitalism, and will exist long after? Two large umbrella-frame sculptures, Site Parasite Dice Paradise and Octom**, both 2023, sprouted miniature spider plant–like replicas of themselves, adorned with strawberries and photographic cutouts of nature’s fecundity: eggs; parasites; animal, plant, and insect babies; and Hill’s own birth. She describes a desire to convey visceral fear, yet also a relatedness: “I wanted to place fear, revulsion, love, the body, life and rot, all together.” Their teetering frames purport to shield us. Yet, without fabric, the tangential and multiplicitous experience of motherhood streams down upon us. Here, Hill presents two seemingly opposing cultural attitudes toward the idea of “mother.” Both sculptures imbue all that is “para”: adjacent to, resembling, oblique. Site Parasite Dice Paradise suggests a sort of gamble and switch, of sacrifice and risk, in the many ways that most living things reproduce and survive. Octom** nods to Nadya “Octomom” Suleman, who, after receiving IVF treatments, gained international attention in 2009 by giving birth to the world’s first surviving octuplets. At the time, Suleman received death threats and was frequently portrayed as selfish, hypersexual, and neglectful by negative public reactions and by exploitative media’s (dis)figuring of her.
Yet to mother is so much more nuanced than this. A series of delicate collages made with blackberry ink, silk tissue, hair, and cutout photographs surrounded the sculptures. Their titles—Curtains, Echo Body, Out of Time,and Fade-out,all 2023—suggested interior, shared states of matrilineal kinship: the physical and astral body across space-time. Hill created Fade-out with her daughter after a day of blackberry picking together. The swirling purple pigment evokes memories of this activity with mothers, grandmothers, and aunties in the warm sun, while tiny rose nail decals conjure layers of quiet focus and pleasure.
In the final installation, the namesake M*****,2023—a cameraless pair of 16-mm films—projectors clicked and chatted away, supported by chairs affectionately adorned with clothes and sneakers from the closets of Hill and her mother. The films are handmade with the same materials as Hill’s collages: In one, a series of burn marks flicker against blackberry-dyed silk tissue—like a pain that fades over time but leaves scars. In the other, smaller images of hair stream by, as lonely strands, then as thick collective tufts. Hill shows what is obliterated and what persists despite it all. Altogether, “M*****” conveyed the feelings limned in a passage by writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, recalling twilight runs with her daughter, who “[demanded that] I stay in the moment, breathe in sharp air and listen for the drumming of our shoes on the cement against the rhythm of our breathing.” Despite so much that is wrong in this world, Simpson chooses joy anyway, because she realizes that one of the best parts of life is being beside someone you love, and that her child is already “dreaming beyond colonialism.” In the same spirit, Hill’s works leave us vulnerable, gratefully expanded, and transformed.
