Online Talk: MOTHERLOAD, A Contemporary Perspective of Madonna and Child

An insight into motherhood through a collection of images with artist, Tabitha Soren. 

Tabitha Soren’s MOTHERLOAD series shows what it looks like when one tries to pursue a creative life and live with your children simultaneously. Soren will share images from her collection and talk about the process and consequences of making photographs of the sleep deprivation, emotional turbulence, isolation and physically draining rollercoaster that is a mother’s unconditional love.  

There will be the opportunity to ask questions after the talk.  

Tabitha Soren has been a visual artist in different domains for over twenty-five years. Soren has long explored the intersection of psychology, culture, politics, and the body. Her mediated images examine the vulnerabilities we all carry and provide the outline for a narrative still endlessly unfolding. Though a palpable sense of pathos connects all her images, Soren begins each new series using the methodical investigative tools she used during her time in journalism. Books, research studies, and statistics lay a necessary analytical foundation for the visual ideas she communicates. These data points then merge with her experiences growing up in a military family, spending her youth moving around the world and adjusting to the cultural differences, social structures, and visual cues that came with each relocation. 

Soren was born in 1967 in San Antonio, Texas and lived in 7 U.S. states, Germany and the Philippines during her formative and adolescent years.  She received her degree in 1989 from New York University and was awarded a fellowship from Stanford University in 1997. 

Soren’s work is in many private and public collections including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; The Cleveland Museum of Art, OH; The New Orleans Museum of Art, LA; Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA; the Oakland Museum of California; The George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY; The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, CA; Pier 24 Photography, San Francisco, CA; and The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA. Her images have been featured in Hyperallergic, the Washington Post, California Sunday Magazine, ArtNews, Newsweek, and the Guardian, and publications include Fantasy Life (Aperture), Trace (Yoffy Press) and Surface Tension (RVB Books). She currently lives and works in San Francisco, California.  

This online talk forms part of the programme of events complementing the exhibition Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood which continues at Millennium Gallery until January 2025.