‘To the Ends of the Earth’ by Jeanette Spicer

"To the Ends of the Earth depicts me, my girlfriend and my mother, and the often unseen dynamics between a lesbian, her mother and her girlfriend. As a lesbian I am a multifaceted person - including a daughter. I make this work to discuss another layer of the lesbian experience which is always shifting and permeates into every facet of one s life. The series is often read from a heteronormative perspective (as we are trained to view all things) as if we are all straight women, therefore further misrepresenting and misunderstanding the lesbian gaze and experience.

I am also interested in physical and psychological boundaries that are formed between adult children and our parents. Certain behaviours or activities, and physical closeness are no longer seen as acceptable, and can even feel weird. I am curious about those moments of tension and taboo to raise the question of why these feelings arise and what makes them so uncomfortable?

Some of the images are more straight forward portraits, while others are layered and fragmented which creates my own world for the viewer to enter. Being a lesbian means that I am often othered and underrepresented; living in a heteronormative society it can be hard to imagine my past, present and future without much example. So these worlds act as places I would want to be real; interactions that could happen in a future where no one needs to hide their sexuality. The activities we are doing in some images speak to the way women are socialised to be intimate with one another, both physically and emotionally, through caretaking and other interactions which walks a fine line between desire, tension and intimacy.

The work is also about seeing my mother as the person she is, not just as a mother. Hinting at the sexism rampant in the ideas of motherhood and expectations on women, and their children, I display my mother’s sensuality, her aging body, our intimacy together and her with my lesbian partner to provoke questions as to why mothers and motherhood is in constant attack, and to ask why mother and daughter intimacy is labeled as perverse. Here I show my mother and look at her as a whole person.

My practice in general is concerned with the historical trajectory in art of women being overly sexualised and objectified, particularly when shown in the nude, mostly made by men, for other men. In this work, I am a lesbian looking at my mother, myself and my partner. I look at adult women s bodies differently, with the option of reconsidering how women can be viewed, and invite the audience to do the same."

Jeanette Spicer has received grants from The Penumbra Foundation, The New York Foundation For the Arts, The Queens Council and The Magenta Foundation. She has shown her work at Rencontres d Arles, Baxter Street Camera Club and Weitman Gallery in St.Louis, among other spaces. Spicer s series, To the Ends of the Earth was acquired by The Brooklyn Museum in 2025.

Spicer published her first monograph Sea(see) with Kris Graves Projects in 2018, and To the Ends of the Earth with GOST Books in 2024, which is shortlisted for the Rencontres d Arles Photo Book Award in 2025. She received her MFA from Parsons the New School for Design. Spicer lives and works in Queens, New York.