Unfinished Business

Ten years ago, when Emma O’Brien became pregnant with her child, mothers were still largely excluded from the mainstream art world, and representations of maternal subjectivities were still firmly placed in the margins. The long held patriarchal view that women could not possibly be both artists and mothers successfully, had found its way into Emma’s own self belief and forced her to abandon her practice entirely for the first few years of her child’s life. The Holding Place (2020) is Emma’s triumphant return to her photographic practice and a transformational body of work in which the artist turns the camera on herself and her child to document the everyday realities as a working mother...Read the full article in the printed issue. Get OVER Journal 3