WILD
with Hannah Schickedanz
16th October 2026 - 11 December 2026 Pinkwood Artspace
My recent work has centred on my two sons and the experience of mothering them as they move towards adolescence. This continues an area of inquiry I have been developing since early 2025, beginning with my exhibition Yield, which focused particularly on my relationship with my ten-year-old and the physical closeness between us. Since then, I have continued to explore the ordinary physical and emotional exchanges of family life — anything from dressing, playing and brotherly wrestling to simply collapsing in front of a TV. These unremarkable moments, often on repeat, can hold much more than first appears: attachment, care, frustration, tenderness and the gradual shifting of relationships.
There is also a sense of coming full circle in these works. When my children were younger, the demands of motherhood left very little time or space for a sustained painting practice. Like many mums, I experienced a significant gap between the intensity of caring for young children and the ability to maintain a creative life alongside it. Returning to painting as my children have grown has meant returning, in a different way, to experiences I was living through but did not have the time or distance to fully process.
Yield marked the beginning of that return. It allowed me to look back at the physical closeness of early motherhood and consider experiences that had been difficult to articulate at the time. This new work builds on Yield, alongside a more recent series of works I have called Tethered, extending my exploration of the changing relationship between mother and child.
My children are now becoming increasingly independent, my eldest is almost at the driving stage (how did that happen!) and I am aware of how quickly this period is passing. I’m interested in the experience of being deeply connected to another person while watching them gradually become separate from you. This is particularly apparent in their different relationships to physical affection: one still reaches instinctively for closeness, while the other is beginning to pull away from it.
I acknowledge that the work is small and domestic. It is personal, introspective and grounded in the particular circumstances of my own family. I am not trying to offer a broader worldview or make work that necessarily disrupts or challenges established ideas. Instead, I am interested in paying close attention to experiences that can easily be overlooked because they are familiar and everyday.
My process starts with photographs, memories and observations drawn from daily life. At the moment, my younger son struggles to wrestle his long, awkward limbs into his clothes each morning, while my older son stays asleep until I tickle his growing feet. I suppose I ‘collect’ these small rituals and moments, memory-banking them before they pass.
These gestures and interactions are then transformed through painting, into a kind of happy mixing bowl where memory, imagination and observation overlap.
Figuration and abstraction continue their sometimes uneasy conversation. Bodies may be recognisable in one moment and dissolve into the surrounding space in another. I am interested in the way a figure can carry both presence and absence, and how relationships between bodies can suggest emotional states that are difficult to describe directly.
A dense, close space in the painting might suggest the claustrophobia of a child taking up space in an adult’s bed, while a scribbly, scratchy line might show the tension between tussling siblings.
While the paintings begin with my own experience of motherhood and my relationship with my children, I hope they will move beyond the particular circumstances that generated them and speak to broader experiences of intimacy, attachment and change.
