Umbilical

Janine Antoni’s work typically focuses on rituals of the body. This sculpture examines the relationship between a mother’s body and that of her child. It consists of a cast of the inside of Antoni’s adult mouth at the round end of the spoon; at the handle end is a cast of the space inside her mother’s hand as she held the utensil. Both the act of feeding and the cast spoon symbolize domesticity, ritualization, and the fetishization of a tool used for a basic need. Ultimately, Umbilical traces in title and form the relationship between and the path from body to home. Antoni states, “I began to think that at first I fed from my mother’s body, then from her hand, and now she would like to pass down the utensils to feed others.”