Honey and Ashes
Lisa Hu, Gabriëlle de Kroon, Anne Nobels, Pippilotta Yerna
10.05 - 29.06.2025
Honey and Ashes brings together works by Lisa Hu, Gabriëlle de Kroon, Anne Nobels, and Pippilotta Yerna, four photographers who each offer a distinct and layered perspective on motherhood. Rather than presenting a singular narrative, the exhibition unfolds motherhood as a spectrum of lived experiences: from deep connection to painful distance, from care and devotion to loss, doubt, and the weight of expectation.
Opportunity, 2022
© Anne Nobels
Pieta, 2020
© Pippilotta Yerna
Through photography and multidisciplinary practices, the artists explore motherhood as a physical, emotional, and psychological state shaped by intimacy, vulnerability, and transformation. The works move between presence and absence, closeness and separation, revealing how motherhood is experienced not only through nurturing, but also through letting go, grief, and choice.
Lisa Hu examines the fragile dynamics of family relationships. Her series I Miss You is an intimate and affecting exploration of the shifting bond between a mother and her teenage child. The photographs capture moments of tenderness, tension, and longing: an embrace remembered, an empty bed, a mother gazing out of a window in quiet hope. The project emerged after a profound rupture, when her son left home for several weeks following a conflict. Through I Miss You, Lisa Hu documents the painful process of separation while affirming the enduring presence of love, even at a distance.
Gabriëlle de Kroon’s work centres on family, identity, and the intimacy of domestic life. Her project Zeb & Carlos was created during a period of mourning and transition. As a mother of two young children, she turned to photography as a way to reconnect with herself and her surroundings. The series reflects a search for comfort and meaning, as she renegotiates her roles as both mother and daughter. Zeb & Carlos offers a quiet, introspective meditation on vulnerability, loss, and the sustaining power of visual reflection.
I miss you, 2025
© Lisa Hu
Anne Nobels draws inspiration from the calm, openness, and coastal landscapes of Zeeuws-Vlaanderen. In Burning Lilies, she explores her conscious decision not to have children through a personal and symbolic visual language. The series addresses the vulnerability and impact of this choice, both internally and within a broader social context. Each image reflects arguments and emotions surrounding parenthood: joy and responsibility, societal expectations, and existential questioning. The lily, a symbol of femininity and fertility, becomes central to the work; once burned, its beauty is irreversibly altered. With Burning Lilies, Anne Nobels opens a conversation around a subject that remains largely unspoken.
Pippilotta Yerna is a multidisciplinary artist who investigates family bonds and mortality. Her project She Is the Canary in the Coalmine of a Dying Empire is both deeply personal and universal, confronting the inevitability of losing a parent. By repeatedly staging her mother in imagined death scenes, Pippilotta Yerna attempts to gain control over an uncontrollable reality. Photography, sculpture, and performance converge in a process that oscillates between fear, acceptance, and the desire for agency. The work raises unsettling questions about how, or whether, we can prepare ourselves for the unimaginable.
Together, the works in Honey and Ashes reveal motherhood not as a fixed identity, but as a shifting terrain shaped by love, absence, choice, and loss: tender and fierce, sustaining and destabilising, intimate and unresolved.
Carlos, 2016
© Gabriëlle de Kroon
◼︎ Throwback
◼︎ Credits
Curated by Hedy van Erp
Cover image © Anne Nobels