Catherine McCormack

In Latin, the word ‘mother’ (‘mater’), comes from the same root of the word as ‘matter’ and ‘material’. To be of a mother then is to be part of the material fabric of the world.

It might be useful to return to John Berger’s Ways of Seeing here and his suggestion that the female nude in art history displays: ‘her nakedness not [as] a function of her sexuality, but of the sexuality of those who have access to the picture’. In other words, her sexuality is relative to an implied owner.