Chloe Blades - What I Imagine When Sitting at My Table

When I metamorphosed my way into motherhood I mostly felt the contradictions of it all as I clawed onto what was left of my sanity. I wanted to surround myself with people but be alone. I wanted plans to be made but get cancelled. I wanted peace and quiet but not the kind that came every hour and a half in the night as I looked down at my baby feeding and saw dark holes for eyes.

People would stare adoringly into the pram and tell me to enjoy every minute because it goes so fast and in the destabilising state of sleep depravation I was in I would stare vacantly wondering if ‘enjoy’ was the right verb to ascribe to this clusterfuck of a life-changing experience. I wanted to sit down with them at a table and ask if they were surprised, like I was, that women weren’t running the world. Us women were over here breaking our pelvises and cutting our stomachs open for the new life we’d created (female God vibes?) and morphing into friesians and bottle-warmers while, as Rebecca Shaw says in The Guardian, “powerful men burn the world down.” Which on a side note, she also says, “I just didn’t expect them to be such losers”. Amen.

Here I am being sedated by antidepressants because men manufactured a world for men by men with men in mind (read Feminist City by Leslie Kern), and yet women (on the whole) are the ones sustaining human life, keeping these little miracles alive by sharing the wealth of all our resources while these morons are measuring each others penises in the form of space ships to Mars and bending over to Trump so they can make themselves richer. How, how, how? We’re just so much better, I said to myself, and then later to my friends - who satiated my need for this debate and joined me at the table where the conversations became the most wonderful moments of temporary respite and laughter.
Yet these conversations pointed to the more complex ideas of what it is to be a woman, which inspired me to strap the baby to me and paint the most vibrant tables that look beautiful and perfect on the outside, just like motherhood and a woman pushing a newborn baby. Through the quotes and books featured in the paintings though there’s a nod, often comical, to the intricacies, wonders and less trodden opinions of women, and what might be lying underneath a joyful exterior.

Natalie Savage, Jacqueline Fahey and Studio Soph were great inspirations of mine with regards to the use of colours and their artistic playfulness. The most influential woman in my work is Deborah Levy, author of the memoir Real Estate, who taught me that women will always have their imaginations to build and create whatever they like and no one can demolish it, monetise it, or take it away. And as someone with an unhealthy obsession to the Mediterranean I spend a lot of time imagining, fantasising, purely for fun, what my life would be like if I knew a yachtsman who could skipper me around Skopolos while I prepare saganaki and tzatziki on the deck, or if I owned a chateaux in France with six cats and had a butler named Reine who fed me grapes. And when I’m suddenly woken from my temporary reprieve in Italy at my table crammed with pizza and sardines while I wait for my friends, as I’m tugged on by my toddler telling me that he needs a poo, I feel grateful that I’m not on that yacht, or alone in that chateaux, but instead here with these bright things that brought my art into existence. Kind of.
About Chloe Blades

Chloe Blades is a manager at Unity Books in Auckland and Director on the Board of Booksellers. Alongside reviewing books on TVNZ’s Breakfast Show, she has written for The Spinoff, WOMAN magazine and Crane Brothers. In 2023 Chloe received a RISE Booksellers scholarship to go to San Francisco and work at The Booksmith in Haight-Ashbury.