岸本絢

Aya Kishimoto

In Japan, women have long been believed to possess innate, instinctive motherhood qualities simply because they can bear children. This belief has been shared as a social norm that frames motherhood as natural instinct.
During the period of rapid economic growth, the “three-year-old myth” became prevalent. This is the idea that mothers should devote themselves entirely to housework and childcare until their child reaches the age of three. Within this framework, maternal self-sacrifice and devotion were upheld as moral virtues.

Despite lacking scientific basis and being widely discredited, the ideology that idealises the self-sacrificing mother persists within contemporary social systems and is deeply internalised by mothers themselves. In other words, while society imposes an idealised image of motherhood onto women, mothers also reproduce that ideal within their own consciousness.

In Victorian-era photography, mothers concealed themselves behind sheets or curtains while holding their infants still during long exposures. The moment when light fell upon the child, mothers would hold their breath and retreat into shadow, concealing their own presence. This anonymised maternal figure mirrors the idealised image of motherhood still upheld in contemporary Japanese society.

What does the form of motherhood that contemporary mothers aspire to truly look like? This work turns its gaze toward the ambiguous and ambivalent emotions mothers carry behind the sheets, questioning the legitimacy of the concept of “motherhood” as it has been constructed within social systems.