At the marrow of the Erika Mayo’s works is the ongoing reckoning with maternal absence. Growing up, the idea of this nurturing and tender presence remained a phantasm, a myth that stirred within the artist questions and narratives carried through the years. Yet growing into womanhood, she encounters an unexpected symmetry: her mother too was once a girl navigating the edges of herself. And now, in becoming a mother herself, the mirror folds again.

Such an experience is hardly limited to the artist. Many women come to moments in their life where they begin to realize the complexity of being a girl/a woman/a mother, and so on. The cow, a giver of milk boxed and barcoded, evokes a kind of domestic automatism. Motherhood becomes a product, a performance, a system of deliveries. Yet it is also sacred, clumsy and sorely under-felt. Through this motif, the artist touches the contradictions of mothering today: its exploitations, rituals, and griefs held quietly in the body.

Kill Your Darlings is the artist’s severing of allegiance to the tales she held dear, stories that cradled and mauled her becoming. She presents sediments of her reflections and investigates if they can be pruned to allow light through, or might the tender and the painful, the inherited and the invented, all be allowed to exist together feral and unfinished?

Words by Jodie Jose