Shitmom (Boundaries) by Tala Madani is the latest in the artist’s renowned series of Shit Mom works. The Shit Mom motif appeared in 2019 when, frustrated by an attempt at painting a mother and child, Madani then a new mother, smeared the image, leaving an oily smudge of brown paint across its surface. Madani immediately seized on the opportunity to portray in her paintings a colloquial phrase used to describe a woman who fails any number of her culture's "good mother" litmus tests, embarking on a new series of works rendering the maternal form in faecal shades of brown.

Highly conscious of the problematic position of the female nude in Western art history, Madani had, to this point, avoided painting women. Shit Mom resolved the issue by allowing the artist to present a female figure without depicting the female body. Her image points to the impossible standards to which mothers are held, while at the same time offering relief from them.

In this work, Madani meditates on the idea of being boundary-less. The shit mom figure has melted into a very small version of herself, surrounded by bright orange warning cones. These phallic-like forms delineate her boundary, while her children trace around her, contemplating her new scale. Existing in unapologetic, undramatic mediocrity, Shit Mom (Boundaries) is an oasis from any notions of perfection.