Boo Saville in conversation with Yvonne John

Please join us for a conversation between artist Boo Saville with Yvonne John from Gateway Women on the occasion of Boo’s solo show at TJ Boulting ‘Ma.’

‘Ma’ is her most personal show to date, incorporating her renowned colour field paintings and detailed drawings with a narrative that draws on her own reflections on motherhood and journey of involuntary childlessness.

‘Ma’ is a Japanese expression which describes the space in between, a deliberately empty space but one which holds its own presence and significance. It is the silence between notes, the pauses which give music meaning, and the emptiness which is full of possibilities. “I have always been fascinated by the charged nature of this negative space. It’s a metaphorical function I guess and one with which I familiarise.”

‘Ma’ also has a second meaning in the context of this work, one much more connected to her personally. It is ‘Ma’ meaning ‘mother’. “I have a strange and melancholy relationship to the role of mother in my life, losing my own mother in my thirties but also after years of fertility treatment not being able to fulfil my own role as a mother to a child. This left me feeling rather rootless, grieving and existing in a nether world not defined by these feminine tropes. In the hours after I lost my mum, an emotional severing of some invisible cord that connected me to her hit me. I have been feeling that rip again, slowly as I start to understand my childlessness. A situation I can only describe as being like a house with no roof and no floor.”

As such the idea of ‘Ma’ takes on this double meaning of both empty space and motherhood. “To be more reflective and positive for a moment, I started to ask myself various questions: What are the possibilities that could happen in this space? Why do I as a woman feel a need to be defined with these roles? Is gender important or relevant in the idea of mothering? As a childless woman, what possibilities could there be that I would not otherwise be presented with? How can I use my work to heal these wounds? So essentially these ideas, although originating from a place of grief have been transformative and given to the world with a huge optimism for what lies ahead. Neither daughter or mother, I am an island in the context of female lineage.”