Mothers and Daughters

Description

Mothers and Daughters
24” x 19” Graphite on Paper | Signed Pamela Watson, 2020

Part of a nine-drawing series created during the pandemic of 2020, Mothers and Daughters (also titled Mother/Daughter: MMIW) was developed as part of artist Pamela Watson’s meditative prayer practice. Each piece in the series reflects a social or emotional issue close to her heart, rendered with care, empathy, and quiet strength.

This particular drawing honors the lives of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIW), a crisis that Pamela first became aware of during graduate school research. The quiet power of the image—a mother bison standing protectively beside her calf—symbolizes the sacred relationship between mothers and daughters and the deep, generational bonds too often fractured by violence and loss.

Graphite gives the drawing a gentle, reverent tone while the vastness of the bison’s presence conveys the emotional weight of the subject. Set against the backdrop of the pandemic, when job loss and housing insecurity disproportionately impacted Indigenous and underserved women, this piece is both a personal meditation and a public act of remembrance.