The Radical Possibility of Domestic Mess

Louise Wallace met fellow mum and artist, Anna Perry through their children’s daycare. In the deep trenches of new motherhood, Louise was chipping away at writing something like a captain’s log, a blackbox of sorts, working whenever her baby slept. By manipulating text from the Huggies week-by-week pregnancy guide into strange poetic shapes, she had begun charting a journey into the wildness of maternal metamorphosis. Louise sent these pieces to Anna, a painter who responded to Louise’s words in her own language of pastoral paintings curiously absent of humans – piles of laundry, baths full of toys, open drawers and clothes drying on a line, that prompts the viewer to ask – who’s doing the looking?

Louise’s ‘captain’s log’ is now a book, soon to be published by Te Herenga Waka University Press, and Anna’s paintings are available to view at Bowen Galleries on Ghuznee St.

Join Michele A’Court as she talks to Louise and Anna about the radical possibility of domestic mess, the great dishevelment of the idealised home and woman, the confluence of painting and language, and the comradeship of creatives and new mothers.