BECOMING (M)OTHER
Collaborative work between Stewart Home and Chris Dorley-Brown. T1/2 Artspace, London December/January 20004/5.

In 2004 I got Chris Dorley-Brown to take portraits of me imitating the poses thrown by my mother in a series of 1966 modelling portfolio photos. We then morphed these with the 1966 photos to create composite portraits. This formed the basis of our collaborative show at T1/2 Artspace. In addition we each installed a film. The morphs were shown alone in November 2005 at Catalyst Arts in Belfast while I was doing events there, and then again with much else as part of the exhibition "Hallucination Generation" which I curated at the Arnolfini in Bristol in April 2006.

My 41 minute film The Eclipse & Re-Emergence of the Oedipus Complex installed as part of "Becoming (M)other" was made while I was in Melbourne as visiting artist at the Victorian College of the Arts in May 2004. In the movie avant-garde techniques and the avant-garde obsession with death interweave with reflections on the life and death of my mother. Images of my mum working as a fashion model and club hostess during the sixties are cut against an at times deliberately dissociated soundtrack that uses stories about her to explore the limits of documentary cinema. This is simultaneously an expression of love and loss and an attempt to draw out the ways in which the avant-garde Lettrist cinema of the early fifties in France was commercialised in the later work of Godard, Marker and Resnais.

Dorley-Brown's film "66/99" was a split-screen remake without actors of the opening to Antonioni's mid-sixties swinging London epic "Blow Up".

More about Julia Callan-Thompson (Stewart Home's mother)

The Age of Anti-Ageing 2014 collaboration between Stewart Home & Chris Dorley Brown that creates a new work using Becoming (M)other as a starting point.

Other Stewart Home art Vermeer II (exhibition) and Prostitution II (work)

Interviews with Stewart Home

Ruins of Glamour at Chisenhale Gallery

2010 Gallery Work by Stewart Home

Art/Anti-Art