Emma Howell
26 August, 2026
Day After Day is my next solo exhibition, opening at Sixteen Gallery in Cheltenham this September. Made across the first eighteen months of motherhood, it captures me and my painting practice mid-crossing.. somewhere between the person I was and whoever I am becoming.
Dates: 25th – 30th September 2026
Venue: Sixteen Gallery, Montpellier Street, Cheltenham, GL50 1SW
Launch event with bubbles: Friday 25th September at 6pm
Parent & Baby Morning: Saturday 26th September at 10am
Motherhood, repetition and becoming
Day After Day is my next cohesive body of work, built extremely slowly in the thick of early motherhood. The motherhood part of the exhibition is deeply rooted in overwhelm and repetition. Feed after feed, nappy after nappy, book after book, toy after toy, cry after cry, smile after smile.. The same actions return day after day while everything about me seems to be changing. My body, patience, ambitions, relationships and understanding of my identity are all being totally flipped upside down.. even when the day appears to contain nothing more than toast thrown on the floor, another pram walk and reading The Gruffalo for the sixth time.
The work has developed over many months, often during Lilah’s naps or in sudden moments of urgency, exhaustion and creative compulsion. It has become a record of desperately trying to recognise myself while simultaneously becoming somebody new. I can appreciate parts of this “new woman”, but other parts feel unfamiliar, difficult, angry and impossible to live with. It is important to note that the paintings are not evidence of reaching the other side of all this, because I am still very much in the middle of it.
There is a palpable tension running through the work already.. particularly between love and rage, which are both severely overwhelming in motherhood. One moment I feel wonderfully engrossed by it all, and the next I feel as though I have fallen down a dark hole of irritability and exhaustion.. ready to throw in the towel. There is the person I was before, and there is a mother still trying to find her feet.. with an uncomfortable and confusing tension between the two of them. Who is she? Where has she gone? What is she becoming? Is she good enough?
Day After Day moves through four emotional seasons within motherhood: Overstimulation, Endurance, Lessons and Becoming (I’ll publish a post talking about each individual season soon). The painting styles fleet from erratic mark-making and intense shading to repeated gestures, crowded shapes and careful brushwork, exposing all of the contradictions within motherhood. It is a really confusing place. It often does not make sense and the feelings are not beautifully harmonious.. so neither are the paintings.
Motherhood is riddled with humanness, connection and a kind of love that turns your entire understanding of the world upside down and inside out. It also brings frustration, vulnerability, resentment, sensory overload and the occasional urge to run very, very, very far away. All of this can exist within the same relationship, and sometimes within the same five minutes. You can want a moment to end and want to remain in it forever. I still do not understand how this is even possible.. perhaps that impossibility is the point.
“The Alchemy of Motherhood“
At the centre of the exhibition is The Alchemy of Motherhood, a vast canvas built over six months. It does not belong to any of the four seasons because it occupies many seasons of its own. It has been messy, ugly, overworked, buried, scraped back and rebuilt again.. There have been long periods where I have deeply disliked it, but that’s an important factor. I have not experienced motherhood as one beautiful, simple experience.. so I do not want the painting to pretend that it has.
It will be the walk in feature of the show, and I am genuinely terrified to reveal it. More than any other piece, it feels like evidence of suffering and love colliding at once.. all the rage, devotion, grief, exhaustion, surrender and awe forced into one huge visual. It may not be the easiest painting to look at (in some lights), but it is probably the most truthful one there.
Grief, Dad and everything he is not here to witness
The show opens during the month that marks ten years since I lost my Dad, so it has inevitably become about more than becoming a mother. It is also a tribute to him, to the life he built for us, and to everything he is not here to witness now.
Grief runs through the work because becoming a parent has made his absence feel different again. He never got to see me get married, become a mother or build an adult life of my own, and there is something incredibly strange about heading into parenthood without one of your own parents here to see it.
I deliberately called the exhibition Day After Day because abbreviated, it becomes DAD. I wanted to weave him into the title from the beginning, so even though the work centres on motherhood, he is there throughout it too.
Making the work and standing in the spotlight
Day After Day is not intended to be a dramatic performance of motherhood with a fluffy, lovely conclusion. It is a raw exposure.. an attempt to untangle and process the shock and the awe of the last eighteen months. It’s also visual evidence of somebody whose life is changing drastically day by day, and who is still working out where the hell she belongs.
Showing the work publicly frightens me, like it always does. I do not exactly want to do this. If I followed my instincts and desires, I would probably make the paintings, leave them in the gallery and disappear as soon as the doors opened. Instead, I continue doing the things that terrify me, because that is the way I have tried to live since losing my Dad. Make the work, paint all day long, say the difficult stuff, open the door and stand in the spotlight, even when every part of you wants to run away.
OK. So, that is what I will do.
Day After Day opens at Sixteen Gallery in Cheltenham on Friday 25th September 2026. The launch begins at 6pm, and a Parent & Baby Morning starts at 10am on Saturday 26th September. The exhibition continues until Wednesday 30th September.
The paintings are still being made.. more will be revealed soon.