DEVOURING MOTHERS
“In our lives we all know of the good and the bad mother. In other words, I have represented the good mother with the Nanas; from now on I will devote myself to her antithesis, to this mother that we would not wish to be.”
Devouring mother, predatory father
During the early 1970s Saint Phalle begins work on her first full-length film, Daddy. In this experimental film coproduced with Peter Whitehead, the incest forced on her by her father and the power dynamics between the sexes are fully on display. At the same time Saint Phalle works on a new series of sculptures, which she calls Devouring Mothers. Staged in situations with their accessories or put in the company of secondary characters, these mature women seem taken from scenes where terror battles with the grotesque. A few years after working on the Nanas, Saint Phalle continues with these Devouring mothers in order to uncompromisingly explore the feminine roles she had begun to look at ten years before.