THE IRRESISTIBLE FORCE is that which connects a mother and a daughter as well as being an implacable and total presence. In this exhibition the work of Kate Palmer and Ingrid Kerma explores the intensity of the relationship they have with their mothers. The visceral plaster body-cast of Kerma's 92- year old mother ELSA explores her mother's strenghts and fragility. Both the surface and the edges of the material seem torn and fragile, and although ELSA is shown on crutches, there is a tremendous physical presence and strength that is communicated. Accompanying the sculpture are two series of Kerma's photographs; one in black and white from 1973 shows her mother dancing with her granddaughter in the garden with joy and laughter in her face and the other is a series of portraits from 2006. These images show her mother's life-force and are a celebration of her and her qualities.

i love that work. your mother does these extraordinary things with her body, there is this flesh that is completely outside the commodification of bodies that we live with, and then there are the things she sews together for her body -- so there is something very powerful about this work, something that is hard to capture in words, about the way the medium produces shells of that body in a substance that is, of course, so radically different from flesh, and the work you had to go through to get it, persuading the possessor, the inhabitant of this flesh to permit the flesh to have a cast on this or that portion of the solid, to submit to the discomfort, and the final piece, its fragmentation, its assemblage from parts, is itself a manifestation of what it is to inhabit the flesh, to have casts put on the flesh. i like this. it's exactly the opposite of what Lucien Freud does, where he subjects people to intolerable expanses of boredom, of discomfort, and the discomfort of the sitter is not permitted to affect the painting, to be seen in the painting.

Helen DeWitt in response to 'ELSA'