Blooming Bold: Moné van Rooyen’s exploration of motherhood

Clearing and Creation: A Journey into the Sacred Feminine is an exhibition in collaboration with the White River Gallery at Hanya House in honour of Women’s Day and Women’s Month. Lowveld artist and ceramicist, Moné van Rooyen, is showcasing three of her artworks as part of this exhibition. Blooming Bold is an exploration of motherhood. Here is Moné’s accompanying note:

“As I look back over the last decade, each phase of this human experience feels like a different size. A different shape. A different hue. A bloom in a different moment of its bold existence.

Many women don’t have a safe space to express the sensory overload they feel after becoming mothers.

It’s miraculous.

And sometimes it’s dark.

Sometimes golden. Sometimes open. Sometimes closed. Sometimes generous and confident. Sometimes insular and distant.

This meadow of blooms is an expression of these feelings. Each bloom is an emotional process in and of itself. Fearing. Becoming. Trusting. Surrendering. Working through. Leaving behind.

Transforming into.

The blooms mirror the arrangement of stars in a small pocket of the night sky the day that my eldest daughter was born. And so as well as being “all the things”, motherhood (and womanhood) is as expansive as all that which we cannot explain.

Motherhood – for me – is blooming bold.” – Moné