Elegy for the Mothers We Never Were – Julia Aronson

“Elegy for the Mothers We Never Were” emerges from a yearning for the ideal softness of the primal bond between mother and infant—a mythical, symbiotic dyad—and reflects on the gap between that ideal and the partial, painful reality that is actually possible. The idea of motherhood versus its lived experience.

The early bond with the infant carries a silent hope for repairing the mother’s own primal attachment. The separation from this dyad also signals a quiet reckoning with what will remain unhealed.

When infancy ends, the fantasy of symbiosis must be relinquished too. This is a farewell to what never fully materialized—both in the baby’s experience and the mother’s—and to the possibility that it ever could.

At the center of the installation is a metal structure that once held breast milk, now emptied and dried. What remains are photographic traces, the documentation of a transformation.

The “Milk Prints” series preserves the material residue left behind on metal plates—archaeological remnants of what might have been. These delicate traces, resembling salt deposits, attest to a presence that was fleeting, a connection that could not fully endure.

The pencil drawing series presents close-ups of the moment of contact between mouth and nipple, but the cropping and proximity abstract the image, turning this intimate moment into a distant, nearly ungraspable landscape.

The ideal of the symbiotic bond appears only in fragments—in fleeting moments. A vision held in the mind, yet elusive in reality.

The sound works heighten the tension between ideal and reality: the repetitive, mechanical noise of the breast pump contrasts with the barely audible, fragile sounds of dripping milk.

This exhibition does not attempt to reconstruct what never was, but to say goodbye. It offers a space for elegy and ritual—a farewell to the ideal motherhood that never came to be, that flickers briefly and vanishes—while remaining with what is: a wounded yet living reality, in which the dream leaves behind a faint trace of hope.