Three uncanny pinkish silicone objects are hanging on the wall, recognizable by anyone with the experience of crouching over a rampaging child in the bath: the sculptures have been cast from infant bathtubs. For other viewers, they may remain enigmatic, hollow, skin-like sculptures, reminiscent of deflated vessels, suspended between states of support and collapse. The title of the series, a polysemous word gravitas, refers to a description of someone, often a man, as serious and behaving in a manner of importance. In Portuguese — a language the artist and her translocal family speak due to their connection to Brazil — gravidas means pregnant, feminine plural. 

Simultaneously full of playfulness and monumentality, Balke’s work embodies the performative female gaze through the de-biologization of care work. The abstract character of her sculptures is relational and questions both the subtexts of maternal labor and art history, as well as its respective materialities. The sculptures are part of the larger series entitled Human Scale in which the artist juxtaposes gemstone stickers and medium format photography, glycerine soap, functional architectural elements, family history and institutional memories. Soft, strange-familiar, elevated from the quotidian and deeply corporal all at once, these works position the experience of motherhood somewhere in between a desire to touch and a desire to run away.

-        Yaniya Mikhalina