SOFT MASS

September 4 - November 30, 2025, Union Hall at Bar Marco

A collection of new works made in ceramic, wood and stone by Elise Birnbaum, framed in mahogany by Aisha Bigwood.

This body of work is an attempt to process the hills and valleys, the heaviness and softness that is existence, as seen through the lens of motherhood.  Some depict weight and bigness, others offer the perspective and a feeling of smallness and softness that mothering a young child has brought me. My experience in motherhood has been both an all consuming vacuum and a mind expanding encounter with compassion, balance and acceptance. 

With seriousness and levity, each work is a meditation on or exploration of a landscape that has brought both crushing heaviness and complete lightness.  These are collected knowledge and experience gained only through being deep within a valley and climbing out of it; enlightenment earned and perspective only realized at the peak when you can see with clarity the entirety of the landscape. 

Framed in Mahogany by Aisha Bigwood, though the word frame feels too commonplace for these wooden structural supports for the ceramic and stone.  They have made each combination of materials feel whole and complete, creating a border for each landscape to exist and to be experienced in its momentary perfectness. 

Motherhood has allowed me to really see a thing with so much more clarity and such greater softness.  These frames, for lack of a better word, allow us to see each attempt at depicting this deep observing.

I have been collecting inspiration for years, carrying around rocks or words in my back pocket, waiting for them to spontaneously combust into ideas. I began making pieces with stones and ceramic, both hard, heavy materials that have a optical softness to them. They became the landscapes and visual language I had been searching for.

I had been looking at Noguchi’s playscapes as I began to spend hours at playgrounds with my child, imagining a world of ziggurat climbing structures and wavefield slides. These landscapes are playful, but also hills and valleys to traverse.

It seemed that every phase of motherhood, or childhood, I became deeply drawn to know it fully or how I would or could approach it. It took up so much of me.

I’ve at times resisted how much my child, or motherhood, influences my work, my interests, my thoughts, my time, my space. It creates tension, being a parent while being a human. When my daughter began to draw, first scribbles, then lines, then circles, then faces, I began to make faces, picking up rocks that could be nothing else but a nose. I was witnessing and re-experiencing childhood as a fully formed human.

There is so much time spent being very present when you are with a young child, it simultaneously feels the farthest thing from and the closest thing to meditating.

These rock faces are a quiet dialogue about that tension, release and observation of existence through the lens of motherhood. Meditations on what it is to be human. 

Motherhood has been a mind expanding drug. It is crashing upon unknown shores. I don’t see how one can find themselves in then landscape of motherhood without becoming radicalized, or at least questioning every system and structure or way of thinking they have ever known.

“Matriarchy is actually completely different from patriarchy. They’re not inverted. Our world is patriarchal so all we know is a world built around hierarchical order and competition and so we think if women take over its going to be… women at the top and men at the bottom, but it’s actually a whole different system.

Matriarchy is a circle

Motherhood is at the center

Everyone is a parent.”

-Liz Plank

At no other point in my life has a threshold from one thing to another been so defined. There is a before and an after, an inside and an outside. Motherhood has made everything come into sharp contrast while simultaneously blurring every line.

I have had the idea to consider Japanese shoji and incorporate it into my work since my time in the Japanese countryside as an artist in residence. Shoji is a door, window or room divider used in traditional Japanese architecture. They are valued for not setting a sharp barrier between interiors and the outdoors; outside influences such as the swaying silhouettes of trees or a chorus of crickets can be appreciated from inside the house.

This work is meant to play on the hardness and softness, the inside and the outside, the inevitability of how one thing affects another. The hard lines and soft ones.

The background of my phone has long been an image of Sisyphus. Since I brought my newborn daughter home and began rolling a metaphorical boulder up the hill and starting anew each morning, my husband and I agreed thats’s what caring for a new baby was like. Endless loops of exhaustion and anxiety. But also, I loved my boulder with a depth I didn’t know was possible. I found meaning in my boulder and joy and would be devastated to no longer push the boulder up the hill.

French philosopher and writer Albert Camus, in Myth of Sisyphus, compares the absurdity of a person’s life with the situation of Sisyphus. Condemned to repeat forever the same meaningless task of pushing a boulder up a mountain, only to see it roll down again just as it nears the top. The essay concludes, “The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

MAYBE SISYPHUS WAS HAPPY

boulder made from ceramic

PRICE UPON REQUEST

Once my daughter, out of nowhere asked me “If it was tiny… would you miss my bigness?” I replied that I would of course, deeply miss her bigness. She is so small, and also so big, and I already miss it in some weird form of future nostalgia.

She collects stones and shells and trash and flowers constantly, asking me to hold them, to keep them safe. These little tokens are usually tiny, but I already miss the bigness and space they take up.

Motherhood, and just existence, is hard and heavy, there is a crushing heaviness to being a parent, and sometimes I think the whole point is to learn how to make it all softer and lighter. It became clear to me quite early, that being a parent is a practice in zen buddhism, if all your basic needs are met and you are safe, you can make it as hard or as easy as you want

I am trying hard to be a good steward of this landscape of motherhood.

We aren’t “supposed” to make art about motherhood. It isn’t really encouraged or historically accepted, which is just a part of a system to invalidate the soft, hard labor of caretaking, of vulnerability. It is too upstream of an approach, too quiet and humble, too similar to the ways certain craft is deemed “women’s work”. But if feels to me like it might be the center of the entire universe.