The Good Enough Mother
HD video, from 4K with 25 mins 30 sec, 2020Bronze sculpture, coloured jiffy clothes and light
Directed by Judy Rabinowitz Price
Script by Andrew Conio and Judy Rabinowitz Price
Voice actors: Terri Ann Oudjar, Edith Emenike and Jennifer Joseph
The Good Enough Mother is a 24 min moving image work that explores the incarcerated pregnancy. The film features Smiling Baby, a bronze sculpture of a baby by Dora Gordine (1895-1991) acquired for the first Mother and Baby Unit at Holloway Women’s Prison in 1948. The soundtrack to the film draws on 28 transcriptions of interviews with women prisoners while pregnant by midwife Dr Laura Abbott, as well as the fieldwork and writing of forensic psychotherapist Pamela Windham Stewart. Co-scripted with artist and writer Andrew Conio the script is re-voiced by actors from Clean Break, a women’s theatre company that uses theatre to keep the subject of women in prison on the cultural radar and whose members have lived experience of the criminal justice system.
In the Good Enough Mother we hear how women interact with the carceral environment creatively and inventively to resist the geographies of power prison is marked by. The bronze sculpture was filmed under different lighting conditions using coloured cleaning cloths (jiffy cloths) as diffuses on the lights. Although imperceptible, this methodology draws attention to the cleaning cloths that women employed in Holloway Prison (and in other prisons) to alter the material environment of the prison as a form of resistance and survival in prison. Cleaning cloths and sanitary towels are the few items that are freely available to women in prison. These items are often employed to adapt and modify the prison environment through the bareness of means to keep warm or ward off bright lights or repurposed to make toilet seats more hygienic and less cold.
The Good Enough Mother was commissioned and first exhibited at the Stanley Picker Gallery in 2020 as part of an Price’s Solo exhibition The End of the Sentence. The work was installed with the material and spatial elements of the installation reflecting those of Holloway Women's Prison: the door height, the bench dimensions and the carpet tiles.
For the duration of the exhibition at Stanley Picker Gallery, the original bronze sculpture by Gordine, on loan from the National Justice Museum, is on display at Dorich House Museum in Kingston, Gordine’s former studio home. Installed in the gallery at Dorich House, its reflection is 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 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 End of the Sentence
Reverie Dorich House Intervention 2020
Dora Paper 11, Dora Volume 1
Art Monthly Review
Art Monthly Letter
The End of the Sentence long form film (post-production)