In GODAM DOGMA, Alice Fraser’s paintings stage an intervention into the psychic orthodoxy of motherhood and the archetype of the bad mum. Neither a mother herself, nor the child of a bad mum, Fraser approaches the maternal as myth, projection, and academic obsession. The exhibition emerges not from personal trauma, but from within the psychoanalytic training space she is currently in where maternal failure is framed as both the root of all suffering and the sacred origin of subjectivity.
 
Fraser asks: what does it mean to make art about bad mums when you haven’t had one—when the ‘bad mum’ is less a memory than a theory? What does it mean to be trained to think maternally while suspended in the limbo of wanting motherhood, haunted by hypothetical children and potential failures? What happens when the language of care becomes clinical doctrine—ritualised, pathologised, and so abstracted it forgets the body it began with?
 
Leaning on, and laughing at, Melanie Klein’s theory of the ‘good breast / bad breast’ dichotomy, where infants split the maternal breast into good (nurturing) and bad (withholding) objects and don’t link them to a holistic idea of mother, Fraser swerves to good breast, bad breath (2025), collapsing psychoanalytic gravitas into something bodily, dumb, and hilarious. In what would usually carry a heavy moral load, where the maternal, in this early abstracted conception of a baby’s brain is both source of salvation and trauma...