Joanna Kirk

Joanna Kirk’s pastel paintings relate her experience of motherhood in which beauty is marked out against everyday reality to provide a new perspective on her work and life. Using her fingers to blend colours and build surface, much of Kirk’s inspiration is drawn from the Impressionist painters Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt for whom domesticity was their given sphere, as well as later artists such as Louise Bourgeois for her ongoing revision of childhood experience. Many of Kirk’s works isolate her children in natural landscapes, exposing their vulnerability and something of the dread and magic of fairytales in which children carry the weight of apprehension and that of their parents. In a frank interview with novelist Rachel Cusk, the artist discusses her fear of self-dissolution, and through the competition set up between creative work and maternal duty, the potential for self- identification in motherhood.