The paintings in Bringing Home Baby depict the meeting of innocent babyhood with prevailing, if idiosyncratic, culture. In each, a baby is confronted by the foreign and intensely detailed culture of a family home: The Female Eunuch on the floor, the Flying Nun on t.v.; two men happily knitting, a girl giving a baby a heart; a sunburnt dad barbecuing, a bejewelled mom sunbathing, a blue teen in angst; a tattooed mother in a swim cap, a buttoned up father in a monkey hat. The walls are hung with art: a Basquiat, a black velvet nude, a Klimt, a bullfighter. Pets have their place: dogs, cats and monkeys. The absurd, dreamlike quality of these homes evokes the strangeness of these new worlds for the babies, and is suggestive of the complex processes by which culture defines and imposes the identity that will shape a baby’s life.

The series follows on my sculptural work, Newborns/Swaddled (Harcourt House, March/April 2019), which showed babies in isolation, yet to be impressed by cultural values, traditions and beliefs. In Bringing Home Baby, the babies have been brought across the border from raw innocence into the unfamiliar and wonderful world of family life.