Katherine Hattam Mother Country exhibition text

katherine hattam: mother country

What should I Call it?

"Pinch Grandma" said 2-year-old Lucky. So there is that. Then I have the tiny photograph emailed by childhood friend Winky Percival, third child of Mary, born Boyd, married Percival, then Nolan when her mother died. We see a mother leaning over a large pram, surrounded by three daughters and friend, Winky, all doting on baby brother John. Looking closer there is Winky pinching my sister Fran, thinking no one was looking.

Usually it’s children doing the pinching, but not always. An adult memory sticks in my head. Jack Hibberd, writer and friend, staying one weekend in the country in a house which had verandahs rather than decks, became irritated with children playing loudly on the verandah outside the room where he was reading, probably Balzac. He nipped outside, also hoping not to be seen by me, and pinched one of my children while telling them to be quiet.

The Pinch is the title of one of my jigsaw wood block prints and a series of paintings. That was a possible title for the show.

The Good and Bad Breast was another possibility. These paintings appeared from nowhere, or somewhere deep. I discovered one walking past a drawing on a canvas and thought "where did that come from?”, and maybe it could become a painting. In my life and out in the world there seem to be young women's breasts and babies all about. Hence the literal meaning.

On another level The Good and A Bad Breast has a very specific psychoanalytic meaning. I am late to really understanding this fully. My sister Fran has helped with her professional knowledge and experience. Decades ago I attended a postgraduate course in psychoanalytic theory, specifically on Melanie Klein. My assumption when babies were described as angry, fragmenting and filled with hate then love, was that these were examples of extreme, mad, crazy babies. It took me years to realise this was a description of the normal experience of Klein’s "good and bad breast".

My work sits on that line between the inner and the outside world. That outside world is represented by what is particular and peculiar to Australia, eg The Platypus, The Mother Country, the Strange Country. An image such as the wave (which is drawn from Hokusai’s wave), comes from a very long love affair with Japanese wood block prints, but also from surfing and being dumped by actual waves. Waves are there also in our experience of feminism and of covid.

I am so glad to have been able to translate my rediscovery of printmaking into reality with the skills of master printers, John Loan at Viridian and Martin King and Simon White at APW.

I finally decided to call this show Mother Country - I came up with it not in the shower, but while swimming laps.

— Katherine Hattam, 2022