Sculpture – Sandra Frances Brown

Hockey Moms Series

22″ X 24″
Hockey Sticks, Hockey tape, Duct Tape, Mixed Media

During winter in the Northern Hemisphere, there is a parallel and invisible league of feminine energies at work. Motivated by maternal love, and with expert multi-tasking form, they fly, spin, sweat, and twirl on their heads, all in effort to bolster the passions of the household hockey player.

If not for the invisible efforts of the parallel league, and teams like the Earthmothers, the Nurturers, and the Winnipeg Hockey Moms, we would not marvel at the hockey stars of the Winter Olympics, or the National Hockey League greats.

The hockey mom is an unsung Canadian hero, deserving of tribute. She’s a unique angelic being who magically gets these kids to the game with everything they need. In the parallel league, the labor involved is huge. Think of the laundry, feeding, scheduling, juggling, shopping, driving, carpooling, and the sleep deprived, shivering hours in cold arenas day and night. Add to this labour the emotional comforting, the encouraging, and the soothing of a child’s wounds. Like it or not, in winter, hockey becomes her life too…..and we’re still only talking about Pee Wee leagues. Never mind if the child becomes elite, where the hockey mom duties compound in intensity.

These angelic-like deities from the parallel league are conjured out of hockey sticks and tape and honour the maternal love and labour that creates the worlds hockey greats, big and small.

Stage Mom

2014
Mixed Media

Being supportive of your child’s pursuits draws you intimately into their world. All the world’s a stage for my daughter, lover of Shakespearean theatre, and all the world’s a moving picture or a comic book for my son, an artist and film maker. The colour, personalities, drama, and volume of life are heightened with theatre kids in the house and you are but a mere background player in their show. One who plays many critical but invisible parts, the driver, catering crew, costume assistant, rehearsal companion, stage hand, sounding board, set and prop assistant, the coach, counsellor and the patron to name a few. With this work, for a brief moment, I want to feature at centre stage, the tireless work of caregivers to child players in theatre and film. Bravo!

Mothercupboard

2015
67″ X 42″
Mixed Media

When my children were young, I often felt like I was an inanimate vessel of nurturing. Their needs were sustained and fed from my being, my interior cupboard that was stocked with the tools and mothering food from my own history and experiences.

Women enter the mothering experience with and without a distinct set of tools and privileges. Since children aren’t born with an attached instruction book, we are left to our own devices to figure out how to raise these beings of mystery. We’re implicated and influenced from our mothers, grandmothers, and other female relatives who always come from a time when child rearing practices and traditions were so different than the current era. These echoes from the past linger in their advice, and family stories can hark all the way back to how our great grandmothers were raised.

So we take instruction good or ill, from family, and the incredible variety of sources in our culture. Ultimately, each of us has to come up with our own recipe for raising each particular child, invoking our intuition and much trial and error. Each stage of a child’s life holds new challenges with more unravelling of the mystery of who they are and what they need. But do we have it in our cupboard?

These Motherfood spices represent my unique recipe for mothering, including the echoes from my matrilineal history, and the mistakes I’ve made. What’s in your cupboard?

Sandra Frances Brown

Mixed Media Artist

Hockey Moms Series

Stage Mom

Mothercupboard