Lines_of_Reproduction-Atlavina

LINES OF REPRODUCTION
The project ‘Lines of Reproduction’ is dedicated to the role of women in society. The
body of work reflects an ongoing personal development through painful self-realisation
as a woman. My main challenge was to find a visual connection between myself being
a child, a teenager, a wife, a mother, and later a female artist.
During the initial stage of the project I experienced tremendous change in my conceptual
practice through new understandings of feminism, social care and art. It was activated by
volunteering for art workshops at a Mental Health Hospital and later at a Rehabilitation
and Support Centre for Women after incarceration.
There, for eight months, I worked alongside female nurses, female art-therapists,
caretakers, patients and women after difficult times. Then, naturally, the work progressed
towards an investigation of women’s role in society, motherhood, breastfeeding, and
fidelity.
Hours of work with vulnerable people continued with days of work in the ceramic and
printmaking studios. While I work I imagine the floating veil of matter which connects to
all reproduction processes, goes around bodily curves, senses attraction between sexes,
bonds females and babies during nurturing, and imagine my mother.
Once, when working on a throwing wheel, I felt with all my senses, the words of Louise
Bourgeois: ‘It is not an image I am seeking. It is not an idea. It is an emotion you want to
recreate, an emotion of wanting, of giving, and of destroying’.
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