We recently had great pleasure in working with Chloe Early on her spectacular new screenprint.
This print is based on my painting Compass which I did last year, the painting became a turning point for me and a way to incorporate new interests into my work. I was thinking about the Mediterranean Sea and how one place can have such different associations depending on who you are and where you are standing. A place of leisure, escapism and beauty to most Europeans and yet a place of fear, danger and possible death to many of the refugees trying to cross the sea to reach Europe.
In light of the on-going refugee crisis and my experiences as a new mother, I made this work to try to represent the all encompassing love and devotion that go into a mother’s relationship to her child. As families we are each other’s Compass, our North, South, East and West.
I have since travelled to Greece and listened to a mother telling me how she wrapped her pregnant self and her three children together with a rope for their boat journey from Turkey to Greece as “if we live, we live together and if we die, we die together”. I cannot un-know and un-hear the things she told me and despite the depths of despair her story reached, the devotion she displayed towards her kids amazed and inspired me.
Motherhood can take us to places of extremes and challenges the breadth of our physical and emotional beings. For those of us lucky enough to be doing this in the comfort of our own homes, it is one thing, for those brave women trying to feed their babies, raise their children and build a life in peace whilst fleeing wars, I cannot imagine their strength.
– Chloe Early
