A lot of the work in Home Truths seems more conventional than we’d expected.
Judith expressed it something like this: many works use the familiar trope of connecting childhood with the mother’s body. Many of the photos, Elinor Carucci’s for example, deliver such poise and self-control; they are beautiful and distant from the chaotic experience of life with children.
One piece which seemed to appeal to all six of us, in different ways, was Gazelle by Katie Murray. The film shows a woman trying to use her Gazelle Total Body Workout Exercise Machine (found abandoned on the street and taken home to eliminate the impact of childbirth on Murray’s body) in the living room, urged on by an motivational video featuring a man with a blonde perm and prodigious muscles.
The woman is interrupted by her child. Partly to avoid injuring the child with the swing of the machine, she picks him up and continues her workout. Another child enters and the same thing happens. This is intercut with a nature documentary of two juvenile cheetahs chasing then hanging off a gazelle in their attempt to kill it. At the end of the documentary the gazelle throws off the young cheetahs and runs free. The dramatic peak of the film however is not this final burst for freedom, it is a little earlier, when a man walks through the living room, looks at the woman hung about with children plodding on with her exercise. He slides round the edge of the room, tries to avoid the gaze of the camera, retrieves his bag, looks back, hesitates, puffs out his cheeks, then leaves through the open door.
Our eldest watched for a while then said ‘there’s two cheetah cubs and there’s two children climbing on the mummy’. Our youngest crawled across the floor and lent her hands against the projection.
