Mother, 2017

An earlier stage of that exploration led to the apparently abstract charcoal drawing ‘Mother’, 2017. Ballard recalls that the family were on holiday in the intense heat of Alicante when her seventh birthday fell, and she asked for ‘a proper big lacy black Spanish fan’. The next thing she recalls is her mother asking to borrow her fan. Mary had a fever from which she succumbed shortly after, and Ballard never saw her birthday present again. Now the suggestion of its patterning summons her mother’s lightness and femininity, while also providing a dark barrier through which she cannot be reached.
Text by Paul Crey-Kent