MOTHER

2018

Mother is a collaborative biofabrication work by WhiteFeather and Yvonne Pelling that explores SCOBY (Symbiotic Culture of Bacteria and Yeast) as both living material and generative metaphor. Drawing on the term “mother” used in kombucha culture to describe the cellulose-forming organism that produces successive “daughter” layers, the work engages processes of growth, transmission, and lineage.

Formed from cultivated bacterial cellulose, the work takes on a visceral, body-like presence—translucent, layered, and stretched into a suspended sculptural form that evokes the interior of a pregnant body. The project emerges from a dialogue between Pelling’s experience as a doula and WhiteFeather’s research into microbial agency and biofabrication. Together, the work situates the maternal body as both biological and relational system, where human and microbial processes are entangled in the production of life.

Mother considers whether microbial life—largely invisible yet foundational—can render the strength, vulnerability, and generative power of gestation, and whether these processes can be materially expressed through living systems.

The work was exhibited at Boochfest in Ottawa in 2018, along with other collaborative kombucha SCOBY works that WhiteFeather developed (see Bucci, for example). The production of the work was hosted by the Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture and Technology at Concordia University.