Sandy Oldaker: What was I Made For?

A quietly confrontational, mixed media installation that stages motherhood as a site of labour, frames ambivalence with permission, and invites dialogue around maternal feeling ‘rules’.

The installation does not offer answers. Instead, it poses an invitation, a symbolic permission slip to ask: What was I made for? What feelings have been foreclosed by maternal ideology? And what might it mean to acknowledge maternal labour not as destiny or devotion, but as work that is complex and politically shaped?

Exhibition Statement:
What Was I Made For? is a quietly confrontational installation that stages motherhood as a site of labour, ambivalence, and permission for nuance.

In the window of Colonnade House, Worthing, two suspended stills hold a conversation across generations. One shows an exhausted pregnant woman articulating ambivalence, fatigue, and even a desire for refusal; feelings so often rendered unspeakable. Opposite her, a future grandmother (her mother-in-law) listens without correction, opening space for those feelings and naming the social ideologies that insist on sentimentalising pregnancy while obscuring its profound labour.

Below, a therapy couch covered in crochet – granny squares stitched together. The couch is an invitation. Will you stop to ask: what was I made for? What has care, inheritance, repetition, but also the cumulative weight of feminised, often invisible work, done to your sense of self? Placed just within reach are works of critical reproductive discourse; anchoring the affective scene in feminist, biopolitical, and philosophical critique.

The installation does not offer answers. Instead, it poses an invitation to ask: What was I made for? What feelings have been foreclosed by maternal ideology? And what might it mean to acknowledge maternal labour not as destiny or devotion, but as work that is complex, ambivalent, and politically shaped.