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From 6–12 March artist Anna Kiparis presents Every Madonna Was Once a Child, a solo exhibition at Arc Space and conceptual prelude to her major site-specific commission for Emmanuel Church West Hampstead.
The project crosses the threshold between the divine and the domestic, reframing the Fourteen Stations, traditionally a meditation on suffering, through the lens of contemporary motherhood, displacement and the sacred weight of the everyday.
Kiparis draws from her personal history — the unglamorous labor of raising twins amidst the isolation of a global pandemic, the precarity of migration — and from this lived experience canonizes a new Station of Love. Its centrepiece, the glass work Madonna with Two Infants, undoes the historical limits of how we view the Madonna, surrounded by a series of smaller glass works holding the radiant beauty written into every icon.
At the heart of the exhibition are the Young Madonnas — seven Italian glass figurines from the 1970s, mass-produced and sentimental, originally titled Teddy and Me. These found objects capture a moment of radical innocence, when caring is still a game, yet within that play the echoes of future love already sound. The process of repainting them hallows what was latent all along; Kiparis imagines it as an act of re-consecration, a rehearsal for the sacred labor of love to come.
