“Mother stands for comfort,” sings Kate Bush in her 1985 song of the same name, an echoing of sentiments found throughout millennia of Western art that celebrate the unique ties created by motherhood. To continue the process of honoring the special relationship between mothers and their children, I created a collage triptych that draws upon a wealth of associations that have both defined and made sense of maternity while exhibiting them in a format that recognizes this tradition and evokes the sense of reverence and devotion that has accompanied common understandings of motherhood.

The triptych form, often employed for works of specific religious import, best reflects the particularly sacred sense of adoration for mothers (and, largely, motherhood) I discerned in various pieces studied in my Art Humanities class. As a concept in art, the realm of motherhood exists as one of the most important and reliable contexts in which women feature in a relatively unobjectified and substantial manner. Through crystallized imagery and venerated figures (rooted in the immeasurably influential Virgin Mary), this tradition possesses the special capacity to unite and build empathy in disparate groups of people in its regard for a subject consistent throughout humanity’s innumerably diverse manifestations. My experience in Art Humanities has gifted me with an understanding of motherhood as a distinct artistic thematic that can obscure distinctions of time and place and ultimately reveal important commonalities of the human experience.

Lyrically, Bush’s song calls to mind the immovable bond between mothers and their children that can hold strong in spite of all external forces, even beyond the limits of objective propriety: motherhood—in all of its forms—can be a subjective state. Notwithstanding this difference of experience and regardless of aesthetic or external changes the idea of motherhood may undergo, one thing holds crucially constant: comfort.