Judy Price Reverie

Dora Gordine’s Smiling Baby (1947-8), on temporary loan from the National Justice Museum, will be on display at Dorich House Museum for the duration of Judy Price’s new exhibition The End of the Sentence (6 February – 4 April) at Kingston University’s Stanley Picker Gallery. Staged in collaboration with Dorich House Museum, the exhibition reflects on the impact of the criminal justice system on women.  As part of The End of the Sentence, Price presents a new moving image installation which features the bronze sculpture which was acquired for the Mother and Baby Unit at Holloway Women’s Prison in 1948. The soundtrack to the film explores incarcerated pregnancy, drawing on the work of Forensic Psychotherapist Pamela Windham Stewart and midwife Laura Abbott, re-voiced by actors from Clean Break, a women’s theatre company active in prisons.

Price’s intervention into the space of the museum installs the sculpture in the gallery where its reflection is visible in a convex mirror to resemble those used with the prison environment. The intervention, titled Reverie, cites psychoanalyst Wilfred R. Bion’s notion of reverie, in which the mother holds and ‘digests’ the baby’s trauma, love, hatred, and reflects back containment. The mirror, a captivating cold glass eye, does not hold, it gives back nothing. Instead, it surveys the sculpture and the space as a whole.