Studio 4, Abigail Tovar’s Portfolio
4th Year Art and Philosophy Student at the University of Reading.
Artist Statement
Artist Statement (07.05.2025)
My practice revolves around the exploration of the nuanced mother-daughter relationship. Within media, the mother-daughter relationship is ever-evolving. Mothers have been portrayed as self-sacrificing saints, while daughters are placed in direct contrast as rebellious figures. My practice explores this relationship with nuance, one that recognizes the emotional complexity, shifting power dynamics, and humanization of both figures in the relationship. In creating short mixed-media videos, wherein I utilize home videos, photos, digital drawings, animations, sound, and text, I explore different aspects of the maternal relationship.For my degree show piece, Best Seasons, I explore the limitations of love present in both the mother and the daughter: in their current stage of life their love is incompatible. As such I took inspiration from Erika Swinson’s chapter in In Reconciling Art and Mothering1; the apple becomes my inanimate object and is explored in two ways. First, the relationships feel kindred to a love imposed on an inanimate object, it is easy for a mother to love her baby, or a daughter to love her elderly mother. Second, the apple becomes heavily symbolic and explores themes of affection, innocence, and age. As such, I analyse the facets of this nuanced premise through a short-projected video. Through the integration of digital paintings into my short videos, I can extend the emotional tone of my piece with texture and gesture. The small animations allow me to visualize verbal complexities, expanding paintings’ capacity, allowing me to communicate themes of care, loss, and intimacy.
I begin my process by looking through old home videos and writing poetry, these become a through-line throughout my piece, helping me stay connected to the message while I weave other elements together. The video medium is important within my practice to facilitate dialogue between the audience and me, because of its inherent narrative properties. As Benjamin Cook stated in his artist seminar, the literacy of T.V. is high because it has grown up alongside the younger generation. This gives T.V. an inherently approachable and narrative-driven quality (Cook, 2024), which I wish to capitalize on within my own work. The choice of projection for presentation further capitalizes on the inherent nature of approachability and warmth within T.V.
The biggest contributors to my practice are Nan Goldin and Margaret Salmon. Goldin’s singular perspective is uncensored, emotional and intimate, as demonstrated in her piece Sisters, Saints, Sibyls2. The overwhelming vulnerability demonstrated in the video creates a permeable membrane between personal and collective experience. As discussed in Emma Wilson’s essay, Goldin uses her sister Barbara’s perspective synthesised with her own and utilizes Barbara’s character to explore her own artistic consciousness, merging the collective and personal (Wilson, 2012, 1-11). The vulnerability of the personal becomes a gateway to the humanization of the central archetypes within my video due to the use of home videos and photographs. And allowing for the audience to imprint on the work.
In my talk with Salmon she stated, “[You’re a custodian for everyone in your film.]” (Salmon, 2025). There is a tangible amount of care that Salmon has for the subject of her videos. Her films are centred around the everyday and are intertwined with poems that are cut with documentary-style descriptions3. Salmon expresses a want of intimacy separate from the institution; a private intimacy shared with her viewers. It is through the utilization of these techniques that Salmon makes her inner thought process understandable and engaging. In my practice, the repetition of apples and drawn themes rhythmically mesh with music such as: in my final piece Best Seasons the song Nancy Tries to Take the Night by Black Country, New Road (Black Country, New Road 2025); allowing for a sustained engaged intimacy to communicate the nuances of the mother and daughter relationship. Hence, I mix the intimate and the “custodian care”, never showing any recognizable faces within my videos unless digitally painted. My videos, like Best Seasons, become a short emotional window where personal memory and symbolic imagery merge to examine intimacy, loss, and care. Through this, I create a moment for emotional complexity while offering the audience an entry point into the intricacies of the maternal relationship.
Footnotes:
1Chapter: “In Search of Mother”, Swinson describes on ongoing performative piece, wherein she took a carboard box off the side of the road begins nurturing it, calling the box Karen. Her piece challenges traditional depictions of motherhood, presenting a fractured identity.
2Three-channel video, 35 min. 17 sec., 2004-2022.
3Study of man in truck based on the story John told me: Documentary, Ratio 4:3, 8 min 50 sec., 2010.
Bibliography:
Black Country, New Road. 2025. Nancy Tries to Take the Night. Streamed. Angelic Studio: James Ford. Cook, Benjamin. 2024. “Reading School of Art Wednesday Artist Talk: Benjamin Cook.” Lecture. Presented at the Reading School of Art Wednesday Artist Talk, November 13.
Gagosian, and Toby Kidd. 2024. “Nan Goldin: Sisters, Saints, Sibyls, Gagosian Open, 83 Charing Cross Road, London, May 30–June 23, 2024.” Gagosian. June 2, 2024. https://gagosian.com/exhibitions/2024/nan-goldin-sisters-saints-sibyls/.
Salmon, Margaret. 2025. “Reading School of Art Wednesday Artist Talk: Margaret Salmon.” Artist Talk. Presented at the Reading School of Art Wednesday Artist Talk, March 12.
Swinson, Erika. 2016. “(20) in Search of Mother.” In Reconciling Art and Mothering, edited by Rachel Epp Buller, 1–289. 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon Oxon OX14 4RN: Routledge.
Wilson, Emma. 2012. “Nan Goldin, Self-Fiction and ‘the Necessary Other.’” Revue Critique de Fixxion Française Contemporaine 4 (4). https://doi.org/10.4000/fixxion.6348.