Kristina Tonev works across durational performance, installation, sculpture, and painting, exploring themes of time, mortality, and care. Her evolving woven straw vertebrae—shaped by their environment—reflect labour, endurance, and maternal attentiveness. Through slow, deliberate making and performance, Tonev examines vulnerability, maintenance, and survival, positioning motherhood as a continual process of transformation.

Anna Ilsley’s myth-inspired paintings confront motherhood, fertility and the politics of the female body head-on. Her vivid, fleshy figures push against the limits of the canvas, asserting presence, desire and power. Drawing on ancient myth and contemporary experience, Ilsley’s work interrogates how women’s bodies are controlled, revered and feared. Within The Motherlode, her paintings reclaim maternal and fertile bodies as sites of agency and excess, challenging historical and cultural narratives that seek to contain them.