There’s a Moth Inside Mother 2024

Moths are a more ancient form of butterfly that fly by night and are drawn to the light. They are nocturnal creatures symbolic of transformation.

There’s a Moth Inside Mother, an exhibition of new works by Margaret Meehan, is about watching female friends have children and seeing those children grow; watching friends try to have children and failing; watching friends lose children; and watching her own mother age. When one identifies as female, a sometimes r(aging) female, life contains mourning, loss and transcendence – all stages of moving through the various cycles of life.

The contemporary political climate is waging a war on women’s bodies, their agency, their right to choose. This war goes beyond sex and is a fight against all forms of gender identity and gender expression and there is an awareness of this in Meehan’s new work. She is inspired by how folklore and fairy tales address similar themes in ways that are horrifically violent but somehow innocent and echo the anxieties that we have in moving through the world. In particular, she has been reading contemporary takes on fairy tales, like the book Happily by Sabrina Orah Mark and My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me, a collection of 40 new short stories by various writers.

If puberty introduces young girls to the notion that growth can cause anxiety, then menopause is its mirror. One’s sex, one’s gender, one’s sense of self – in relation to the materiality of a body – offers life as a constant state of metamorphosis, an oscillation between innocence, awareness, and the promise of wisdom. The inverse of the embodiment of an imagined sense of self is a stranger staring back at us in our own reflection.

Much of Meehan’s new work uses humor and lightness to address such topics. By referencing cartoons like Little Miss Sunshine, Nancy, and the Peanuts comic strips, all drawn from her childhood, and mashing up the timeline with historical fertility goddesses, such as Sheela na Gig and the Venus of Willendorf, she creates new deities for her own modern narrative.

There’s a Moth Inside Mother is about being (an)other, being a (moth)er, being a non-mother, and it’s about having a sense of humor inside it all. Hoping that, like a fairytale, “they all lived happily ever after.”