Ruth O'Leary: Hidden Mothers

11 October – 9 November 2025

Opening: Saturday 11 October, 3–5pm

Mary Cherry Contemporary

Mary Cherry Contemporary is pleased to present Hidden Mothers, a solo exhibition by Ruth O'Leary featuring a new body of photographic work that confronts the myths and iconographies surrounding motherhood and the maternal body.

Taking inspiration from Hidden Mother photography of the Victorian era—where mothers were obscured, draped, or erased to focus on their children—O'Leary uses her own experience of motherhood to engage in a critical dialogue with the existing arsenal of mothering myths. Continuing her innovative use of the photo booth as studio space, O'Leary builds new iconographies patterned with symbols of domesticity, sexuality, and death, reclaiming visibility for the maternal body that culture so often renders invisible.

Witches, washing machines, ravens, and clocks recur throughout O'Leary's new photographic work—domestic objects and mythic figures that constitute the visual lexicon through which motherhood is culturally inscribed. In Hidden Mothers, she appropriates and transforms these loaded symbols, constructing a counter-iconography that speaks to the materiality of maternal experience: its embodied labour, its corporeal presence, its simultaneous enactment of creation and erasure.

O'Leary's work consistently generates profound responses from audiences, particularly women who recognize their own experiences reflected in her unflinching artistic exploration of femininity, motherhood, and female agency. What distinguishes O'Leary most powerfully is her refusal to accept the false binary between artistic excellence and motherhood. Her maternal experience has become integral to work that addresses urgent social and political issues, redefining photography as a medium for giving voice and materiality to experiences often marginalized in mainstream discourse.

Hidden Mothers continues O'Leary's commitment to centering maternal experience within her practice—work that draws its power from the full complexity of her lived reality as woman, artist, and mother.