Reverie/Dorich House Intervention
Smiling Baby, Bronze sculpture by Dora Gordine and mirror, 2020
Dora Gordine’s bronze sculpture Smiling Baby (1947-8), on temporary loan from the National Justice Museum, was on display at Dorich House Museum for the duration of Price’s exhibition The End of the Sentence (6 February – 4 April 2020) at Kingston University’s Stanley Picker Gallery. The End of the Sentence reflected on the impact of the criminal justice system on women. As part of the exhibition, Price presents a new moving image installation The Good Enough Mother co-scripted with Andrew Conio which explores the incarcerated pregnancy and features the sculpture. Gordine’s ‘Smiling Baby’ was acquired for the first Mother and Baby Unit at Holloway Women’s Prison in 1948.
The sculpture was installed in the Gallery at Dorich House Museum, its reflection visible in a convex mirror sourced by Price and Conio to resemble those used with the prison environment and compose an intervention titled Reverie. The title Reverie cites psychoanalyst Wilfred R. Bion’s notion of reverie, in which the mother holds and ‘digests’ the baby’s trauma, love, hatred, and reflects back containment. The mirror, a captivating cold glass eye, does not hold, it gives back nothing. Instead, it surveys Smiling Baby and the space as a whole.
Genorously supported by: Arts Council England/Elephant Trust, UK/ The National Justice Museum, Nottingham, UK/Stanley Picker Gallery, UK/ Dorich House, UK/Cinenova, UK/ Islington Museum, UK/ Radical Film, Berlin/ Department of Allied Health and Midwifery, University of Hertfordshire, UK/ Kingston University, UK/ Born Inside, UK/ Clean Break, UK/ Women in Prison, UK/ Reclaim Holloway, UK/ Community Plan for Holloway, UK/ Peabody.
Solo exhibition Stanley Picker Gallery 2020
Press release
The Good Enough Mother 2020
Dora Paper 11, Dora Volume 1
Art Monthly Review
Art Monthly Letter
The End of the Sentence long form film