Motherhood, Memory
and Why We’re Putting It on Gallery Walls
On March 12–14, Holly Christine Callaghan and I will open an exhibition called Motherhood at The Copper House Gallery in Dublin (Dublin 8, D08 EE73).
Opening Night: Thursday March 12, 6 pm to 9 pm (with wine reception)
Friday March 13: 10 am to 4 pm
Saturday March 14: 10 am to 4 pm
It didn’t begin as a grand plan. It began with a phone call.
Holly and I met through art years ago. Not medicine. Not the podcast. Art. She knew me as someone who painted before she knew I worked in neonatal intensive care. When she rang me about the idea of an exhibition, she said she wanted to return to painting properly, and that motherhood had shifted everything for her. She also said something that stuck with me: that she felt I didn’t get to make enough art anymore.
The timing felt right.
Holly’s story over the last few years has been complicated. She experienced a miscarriage two weeks before her wedding during the Covid era. Not long after, she became pregnant again. Her son Leo was born severely unwell and spent nine days on a ventilator before coming home. Twenty months later, her daughter Amber was born in what she describes as a healing experience.
In between those births was the kind of early motherhood that most people don’t post about. The exhaustion. The identity shift. The pause in creative life. For Holly, painting stopped. Family took over.
This exhibition marks her return.
Her work combines ballpoint pen and paint, pop surrealism and portraiture. The bodies are unapologetically present. Pregnant torsos. Blooming forms. Figures that feel both strong and exposed. There is colour and vibrancy, but there is also tension. One piece depicts a mother divided in tone, suggesting the internal split that many women experience but rarely articulate. The joy and the fracture sitting side by side.
My own relationship to motherhood is different, but adjacent. I have spent more than two decades working as a neonatologist at the Rotunda Hospital. I witness the beginning of parenthood daily. I see fear, relief, shock, resilience. I see mothers in control and mothers overwhelmed. I see the quiet competence that develops in real time.
In my work for this exhibition, motherhood is not a single moment. It is a process. The pieces move from abstraction toward form. Shapes become recognisable. Colour settles into bodies. The work reflects how identity shifts gradually rather than instantly. Becoming a mother is not a switch. It is an ongoing reorganisation.
Between Holly’s experience of living motherhood and my experience of observing its earliest hours, a conversation has emerged. The exhibition is that conversation made visible.
The show includes mixed media works that range from intimate to graphic. Some pieces are restrained and minimal. Others are bold and almost electric in tone. Across them all is a shared interest in the body, in protection, in transformation.
We chose to open the exhibition in the week of Mother’s Day deliberately. The day itself often simplifies motherhood into something neat and celebratory. The work on these walls is not neat. It reflects exhilaration and boredom, trauma and repair, autonomy and responsibility. It reflects the fact that motherhood alters a person in ways that are physical, emotional and existential.
This exhibition is also taking place during a time that feels personally charged. With family of my own currently living through instability in Kuwait and in Palestine, the themes of protection and family are not abstract. Proceeds from artwork purchased through my art page will go toward supporting families in Palestine through trusted contacts on the ground. That decision sits quietly alongside the exhibition. It is not the centre of it, but it is part of it.
The exhibition details are simple:
Motherhood
The Copper House Gallery
Dublin 8
Opening Night: Thursday March 12, 6 pm to 9 pm
Friday March 13: 10 am to 4 pm
Saturday March 14: 10 am to 4 pm
There will be a wine reception on opening night.
If you have followed either of our work over the years, this show brings those strands together. It is not a departure. It is a consolidation.
Motherhood is often spoken about loudly. This exhibition attempts to look at it more directly.
We would be glad to see you there.
Afif
