Star Curd

We Need To Talk About Yvonne

Some musings on Yvonne Todd’s exhibition Star Curd at the McLeavey Gallery

I recently read an excellent synopsis of the film The Exorcist (1973), written by the mother of young children: “After a single night of caring for a sick child with a nasty stomach flu, two grown ass men seek the sweet relief of death.” 

With a similar dry wit, the artworks in Yvonne Todd’s Star Curd grapple with the banal horrors of motherhood. A pair of defrosted placentas appear like primordial monsters straight from the props department of a horror movie, their belligerent tentacles protruding from its oozing, viscid body. As mothers, we may intellectually recognise the powerful beauty in these organs, which provide oxygen and nourishment for our precious babies in the womb. But also: UGH. Mostly, it’s hard to believe something so gross and alien could have ever come out of me.

After the birth of her children, Todd took their placentas home in little plastic tubs resembling yoghurt pottles. They laid dormant in her home freezer for years, next to the ice cream and frozen peas, until she was compelled by a Dr Frankenstein-esque urge to bring them back to life. As she describes: 

In their frozen state, the contents of each appeared to be a dark mass, like a clump of stewed plums. Once thawed, I rinsed them under the laundry tap, allowing their shape and form to emerge. To me, the placentas are almost sentient, their umbilical cords reaching out like tentacles.

Presented against a clinical white background with an almost aggressive frankness, the unruly twinned placentas mark a new, more experimental direction in Todd’s work. The uneasy psychology that characterises her photography ripens here into somethings more overtly squeamish and visceral. The true horror, however, is not in the placenta’s grotesque appearance—that’s just another mundane part of the disgusting miracles of motherhood, alongside episiotomies and those explosive poos that go all the way up babies’ backs. Rather, the horror is in understanding that our bodies are capable of making strange, powerful things, but that we have no real control over them once they enter the world. 

This is even more true of the children we birth. In Todd’s Portrait in Pink, the twin umbilical cords are mirrored in the pink ribbons wrapped around the young woman's pigtails. The pink feathered epaulettes on her shoulders resemble the shape and tentacular quality of the placentas. Sure, she looks pretty in pink (indeed much prettier than the placentas), but what might she really be capable of? 

This eerie psychological doubling is repeated with identical twins Netta and Skivna, who pose with rustic whittled pitchforks festooned with pea straw. Todd imagines they could be the demented offspring of the women in her recent exhibition Brides at The Dowse Art Museum, which featured a series of unconventional bridal portraits that alluded to mysterious cults and ancient fertility rituals. With their bowl cuts and turtlenecks, Netta and Skivna bear a striking resemblance to the creepy blond mind-reading children from Village of the Damned—a classic 1960s horror film about women impregnated by a brood of parasitic aliens. Todd also describes this work as having subtle undercurrents of the freaky 1980s British children’s TV show Worzel Gummidge, filtered through Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s 1970 sci-fi UFO series. 

Part of Todd’s inspiration was centred around recent feelings of professional jealousy and FOMO. These feelings were triggered in the wake of articles trumpeting blue-chip international artists, including Camille Henrot and Caroline Walker, for tackling “the art world’s final taboo around motherhood” with their paintings of birth and breastfeeding. This subject matter also xharkens to the work of pioneering conceptual artists of the of pioneering conceptual artists of the 1970s such as Mary Kelly, whose seminal work Post-Partum Document meticulously documented the mother-child relationship during her son’s formative years. The work most famously caused outrage in the press when Kelly displayed his used nappies at the ICA in London alongside detailed notes about his diet. 

Star Curd draws a line between these high-profile feminist practices, and the ambivalent psychology of the mothers in horror films, who must grapple with guilt, rage and helplessness as they come to terms with their monstrous offspring. There are endless examples of this filmic trope, which plays on our most visceral fears of the things that lurk inside us. In The Exorcist, Regan’s poor mother has to call in the priests when her sweet daughter transforms into a foul-mouthed, projectile-vomiting demonic nightmare. The mothers in Village of the Damned are forced to overcome their protective maternal instincts as their bundles of joy grow into murderous little freaks. 

This is also a poignant metaphor for the anxieties around art making. There is something scary about releasing your creative progeny into the world and letting their tentacles unfurl. Having recently embarked on an MFA, there is a sense with Star Curd that Todd is preparing to give birth to strange and interesting new things with her work. Good art, like motherhood and horror movies, is not for sissies. 

Chelsea Nichols