I’m standing in front of Sea, a large-scale installation by Jodie Carey commissioned for London’s Foundling Museum. It was inspired by the tokens that mothers left, along with their children, at the Foundling hospital, Britain’s first home for children at risk of abandonment, in order that they should be able to one day identify and claim back their offspring. Sea is formed of hundreds of swatches of fabric dipped in liquid clay and fired to create fragile, pale textured fragments where the original material has burned away. The effect of these fragments – the shells, essentially, of the maternal comfort objects belonging to some of history’s invisible children – is startlingly moving.
On Mother’s Day I had gone to the Foundling Museum and seen some of the tokens for myself, and learned how rare it was that a woman came back for her baby. Sea pays tribute to these babies and the impoverished mothers who could not keep them. According to the exhibition guide, “the mothers’ intense feelings of separation and loss find a visual analogy in the vast ceramic outpouring.”
