In the sprawling landscape of contemporary public art, only a small number of works achieve the rare feat of simultaneously unsettling, enlightening, challenging, and embracing the viewer. Renate Verbrugge’s Mothers and Daughters, a set of four sculpted female figures quietly occupying their place in Christchurch, belongs unequivocally to this select class.

 

They do not whisper into the environment — they assert, occupy, and echo. Their forms, rounded and unapologetically ample, resist the modern world’s obsession with streamlined silhouettes. Instead, they embody continuity, ancestry, and the deep-rooted corporeality of the maternal line.

 

And yet, they do something more daring still: they force society to confront itself.

 

A Quartet of Maternal Archetypes:

 

The Four Figures That Refuse to Be Ignored

 

While casual observers may focus instinctively on one dominant figure, the work is not singular. Verbrugge gives us a quartet, a multi-generational echo chamber where bodies are not merely bodies but histories — carried in flesh, posture, and presence.

 

These four figures allow the viewer to contemplate:

•motherhood as lineage,

•femininity as multiplicity,

•pregnancy as both potential and memory,

•and womanhood as a continuum rather than a moment.

 

They suggest that maternal identity is never solitary, never confined to one body or one role. Instead, it is shared, inherited, exchanged — a choreography spanning ages, cultures, and truths.

 

Fat or more likely all pregnant and yet regardless of the constrained plausibility of such a reality within the narrow decades of the 21st century where children can even have two biological mothers. When looking from behind these highly provocative figures and the partially domineeringly lustful position of the mother alone, one can’t help but think of Easter Island — a place that has nothing to do with the great lamb feasts of Christendom, but more for those who are unaware, it’s ancient, somewhat primitive monoliths.

 

Easter Island, Primitivism, and the Inherited Shape of Memory

 

The comparison with Easter Island — initially startling — becomes almost inevitable the moment one views Verbrugge’s figures from behind. The stoic solidity, the grounded heaviness, the monumental stance: these are the visual signatures of cultures that worshipped not slimness but endurance, not beauty but continuity.

 

Like the Moai, the four figures do not seek admiration; they demand contemplation.

 

Easter Island holds no ties to the feasts of Christendom, yet the juxtaposition illuminates a critical point: Western art history has long attempted to separate the sacred from the “primitive.” Verbrugge collapses this artificial divide, reminding us that what we call primitive is often simply honest, ancestral, or unfiltered.

 

In this sense, her four figures become bridges linking:

•prehistoric fertility idols,

•medieval Marian iconography,

•early modern domestic portrayals,

•and today’s pluralistic, technology-shifting definitions of motherhood.