Mother: Norfolk - September 2025

During her Artist Residency in Norfolk, MRS ROE developed MOTHER - a new strand of her practice exploring femxle connection to the land through performative bread sculpture. The project situates her lived experience as a childless, peri-menopausal womxn within feminist critiques of domestic and biological labour. Using bread as both material and metaphor to interrogate inherited expectations that womxn must cook, nurture, and reproduce in order to be valued. The fermenting sourdough starter, or ‘mother’, becomes a live microbial form dependent on care, through which she redefines nourishment as an ecological, rather than reproductive, act. Over the residency, her focus shifted from perfecting bread to embracing its failure, reworking stale loaves into fragile, hollow vessels that were baked, dried, or left to decay. These imperfect forms stand as quiet metaphors for the exhausted body, for care withdrawn, and for a deliberate refusal of diligence.