New Arrivals (2009) by Nicole Porter was a personal reflection on her own story as an adoptee growing up and demonstrates the unresolved feelings she has now as an adult. She cites artists like Annette Messager and Tracey Emin as influences in her work. New Arrivals presents the audience with an alternative point of view to the arrival of the unborn child, one that is hidden and often untold.
One item of Tracey Emin’s Baby Things (1998) Emin (in bronze painted to look like the real thing)
Example of Annette Messager’s work Penetration (1993-94)
Porter explored this psychological landscape by suspending a collection of various second hand baby dolls from the ceiling by their umbilical cords inside the space of an Oxfam Shop. The audience was barred from entering the shop and interacting with the dolls and could only view the installation from designated peepholes in the windows. In order to gain a better view of the work the audience were forced to look through other peepholes, but the full view was always obscured. Porter appeared to be asking whether you ever get to see the whole picture with adoption? The installation forces the viewer to see the connections as well as the separations for adoptees. The exhibition was described as ‘Awkward and uncomfortable yet intriguing’ because it made the spectator feel ‘almost like a pervert’ when looking through the peepholes and adoption can be a world of secrets and manipulated truths for some adoptees and one where they are ‘kept in the dark’ as far as their own history is concerned. http://visual.artshub.com.au/news-article/reviews/visual-arts/media-release/new-arrivals-the-sydney-building-178965
Writing in the Australian Journal of Adoption Porter describes how difficult it is to express in words what being adopted is like, especially as she has two different names, one given by her birth mother and the other by her adopted parents. She explains that the uncomfortable emotions she feels only subside when she is being creative and says that ‘Art is a means of giving form to that which cannot be expressed in words’. www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/aja/article/download/2379/2845
Scan (macro image of a section of a Physalis flower pod with seedling)
