Mom, the title of Andréa Keys Connell’s exhibition at Artspace in Raleigh, NC, is disarmingly simple—an everyday word that holds extraordinary weight. It is a name, a role, a memory, a longing. In choosing such a universal term, Connell gestures to the multiplicity of maternal experience, inviting each viewer to bring their own inheritances, expectations, and emotional truths to the conversation. Mom refutes that futile query of how to do it all, carving a path for one quiet but powerful question to billow, asking, “Do you feel this, too?”
For the Boone, NC-based artist, motherhood is not an isolated role but a totalizing force that seeps into every part of life. “My life is my practice,” says Connell, and a responsibility of care, whether understood for our children, our parents, our environment, or ourselves, expresses itself in her latest body of work.
Holding (2024) features a woman leaning against a cobalt blue, scallop-patterned sheep as a bouquet of rose-like flowers overtakes her head. Her arms encircle a child who buries their face in her body, crystallizing a moment of peaceful protectiveness amid the gallery’s cacophony of diverse patterns in a primarily pastel palette. The sculpture metaphorically embodies acts of love and care—quiet, resilient gestures that feel especially resonant after Hurricane Helene’s recent devastation in Connell’s home of western North Carolina. “I want people to feel held,” she says. “And if they collapse, there’s going to be somebody there to catch them.”
Precarity reverberates throughout Mom, especially with the in-the-round sculpture Window (2024), which depicts a kneeling woman, cloaked in stripes and dots, bisecting a sharply black-lined, wood-like ceramic wall to rest her head in her hand. The piece is daringly planted on a narrow pale pink pedestal merely an inch wider than the base, causing the figure’s toes to cast shadows over the edge. Like a character caught between the pages of a storybook, she seems trapped between two dimensions, straddling an emotional and physical threshold.
Connell embraces imbalance as both a lived truth and a compositional tool, conjuring a kind of storybook splendor and innocence in her saccharine portrayal of motherhood, which contrasts with the grittiness of her earthenware clay body. In Hearth (2025), the central female figure, dressed in picnic red gingham, holds a striped cat, a vase of baby blue flowers, and her hand to her heart as she stands on her tiptoes in a squat, cocooning three children between her legs like nesting dolls. In a similarly whimsical and physical feat, a woman in green stripes and thick black criss-crosses is steady in a headstand, one leg extended straight and the other bent and flexed, carving a window framed in flattened florals in Keeping the Window Open (2025).
For Connell, imbalance, whether accepted or not, is a reality of motherhood. In her sculptures, women are expected to manage everything with a certain impeccable quality that obscures any trace of messiness. Her figures are stuck in a position that proves they can “do it all,” as societal questions reinforce the necessity for them to contort into a fabricated image of perfect balance.
“There’s no balance,” Connell affirms when I ask her about her work. “There’s no pattern. There are no guidelines. There’s no road map to say ‘this is how you do it.’” Yet, there’s an incessant deluge of spoken and written contradictory instructions on how to be a mother, a daughter, a woman, a partner, an artist, and more. These directives often lead to attempts at discerning and staying within the lines of an accepted pattern–in the case of Mom, the palindrome. “There’s so much pattern [in my pieces],” explains Connell. “But there’s no way to stay inside a pattern when you’re going through life.” Instead, the symbols and motifs in Mom craft emotional narrative arcs that one must fill in with their own experiences.
In asking viewers to sit with contradiction, to locate themselves in the swirl of care, exhaustion, and love, Connell offers not a solution, but presence. Together with Artspace’s Creative Director, Annah Lee, she crafted a space where feeling is enough, love is complicated, and the maternal is as expansive as it is intimate. Encountering Connell’s sculptures feels like you’re entering a dialogue. Their scale, posture, and fragility draw you in close, asking not only to be seen, but to be felt.
Andréa Keys Connell: Mom is on view at Artspace in Raleigh, North Carolina, through April 27, 2025.
