Sandy Oldaker: What Was I Made For?

What Was I Made For? is a quietly confrontational installation that stages motherhood as a site of labour, ambivalence, and permission for nuance. About 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. About the Artist: @themotherresearcher is a local conceptual artist, academic and university lecturer whose work explores reproductive labour and its social, political and affective conditions. Drawing on feminist philosophy and lived experience, her practice interrogates motherhood, care, and the hidden economies that shape women’s lives. Artist Statement: My art practice is seldom an act of mere expression. Instead, it begins with a stirring, existential angst of some kind. A news story. A conversation. A gesture. A witnessing of something. The work: What Was I Made For? is just this. A dialogue that could not remain private. I saw Kailie’s words. The image of her exhausted. The statement of ambivalence. Coupled with a genuinely sincere call for solidarity. But I experienced something much more. I experienced a compulsion. Driven by a rage. That leaks out of me at every opportunity. Creatively. Academically. Verbally. “This cannot go on unseen”. Read more Toggle Installation