Mamma

(2024)

290 x 110 x 120 cm
Coralline limestone

Photo: Wojtek Ciszkiewicz

Mamma is Latin for breast and in many languages the word for mother. Mammalia is the scientific name for mammals, animals that secrete milk while caring for their young. Mammals provide their little ones with warm, nutritious food in hostile conditions such as changing territory. In Ida’s Mamma sculpture, she brings together parallel strands of her work, as she developed autobiographical representations of female intimacy in parallel with symbolic representations of animals. The synthetically depicted body parts were situated on the borderline of organic abstraction, balancing between literally depicted anatomy and an abbreviation that takes the theme of vitality beyond human physicality.

The monumental Mamma was sculpted from coral limestone extracted from Maltese quarries, a material that is part of the island’s sculptural history. Ida decided to incorporate the ancient figures of the Mother Goddess created from Maltese coral limestone into the shape of her sculpture.

The prehistoric sculptures seem a kind of declaration of faith that we can, by means of suitably shaped matter, have a real influence on one or another shape of events yet to come, that we can carve our future. Exuberance, saturation and fertility ensured perdurance and continuity, as well as the existential hope associated with survival, the gathering of strength to cope with adversity. Mamma departs from genre distinctions. The carnality of the sculpture is mammalian, belonging neither to a human female nor to another representative of a sister species; it is a Venus figure liberated from species egoism, extended to the whole phylum, and evokes the memory of human and animal foremothers to whom life owes its survival.

The sculpture was created during a residency organized by Luginsland of Art and the OmenaArt Foundation.