The idea for this work came from a conversation Janine Antoni had with her mother about the family’s silverware; the artist later borrowed a spoon engraved with the letter “A” from the set and incorporated it into Umbilical. At one end of this sculpture is a negative impression of the artist’s mouth; at the other, is a negative impression of part of her mother’s hand. Antoni said, “I thought it was curious that I had fed from her [my mother’s] body, that maybe she had actually fed me from this particular spoon, and now she wanted to turn around to give me an object for feeding others. It’s an object loaded with ideas of domesticity and culture.”

Label from DECADE: Contemporary Collecting 2002–2012, August 21, 2012–January 6, 2013