Reclining Middle Mother, PP’s Nude in a Garden, Birth Plants, NO Vessel brings together various representations of women originally framed through the male gaze, re-presenting them as subjects rather than objects. The work features a female figure turned self-portrait, appropriated from Dream Brother (2022), a painting by my son’s father, alongside an abstracted nude derived from Picasso’s Nude in a Garden (1934). Banksias recur as symbols of maternity, while a vessel crafted by my friend Natalie O’Loughlin alludes to Ursula K. Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (1986) suggesting notions of holding and carrying—both literal and metaphorical—as a woman and mother.