Sanné Mestrom

Sanné Mestrom’s Weeping Women make up a group of public sculptures that are deeply informed by the artist's feminist perspective. They engage in a dialogue with the history of modern art and make a concerted effort to subvert the forms, materials and techniques that are typically associated with canonical male artists’ works. In Weeping Women, the female body is extolled as a life-giving force, alternately adopting birthing postures and referencing the Aztec goddess of purification Tlazolteotl or Ixcuina. Rather than the ‘tortured’ muse, as Pablo Picasso represented his lover Dora Maar in Weeping Woman, 1937, in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria, Mestrom’s Weeping Women are figured as self-possessed and nurturing. Not only do they lactate, with breasts as fountains, their soft, curved forms invite passers-by to gather around—to sit and lay on their bodies. Mestrom’s sculptures are intended to arrest viewers, even cause them to double-take, precisely because they deviate from the male-dominated history of public sculptures.

Weeping Women is an Ian Potter Sculpture Court Commission, commissioned by Monash University Museum of Art, Caulfield Campus, and relocated to Clayton as part of a landscape project with Taylor Cullity Lethlen Landscape Architects (TCL).

^{Photo: Christian Capurro}