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Until August 22 The Barnard Gallery will be converted to a nursery, replete with baby bric-a-brac,like bottles, toy duckies, teething paraphernalia and the rest of the essential tools required for raising children.

Artist Marieke Prinsloo-Rowe makes her solo debut with an evocative installation called With Young – a lovingly executed meditation on motherhood and the mini rites of passage experienced by a young family.

Prinsloo-Rowe is already renowned for Walking the Road – a symbolically charged sculptural essay executed for her Masters in Fine Art – on our young democracy and its quest for liberation, equality and hope. Displayed along the Seapoint Promenade from June 2010 to January 2012 the installation featured 18 sculptures of a delicately-rendered little girl in a bathing costume, with arms outstretched, who, in her desire to fly, follows and merges with a dragon fly – the symbol of renewal and change.

With Young reflects and extends Prinsloo-Rowe´s ongoing preoccupation with the human form, self-transformation, as well as her ability to integrate the sacred with the profane and the mystical with the mundane. “It is a way of marrying my work as an artist and my role as a mother,” she explains, “of articulating the process of making babies in my womb and giving form to them through sculpture.”

Comprising life-size sculptures of her three young children, of herself while pregnant, as a mother with baby balanced on her hip, and in recline, With Young is Prinsloo-Rowe´s personal ode to femaleness and family.

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