The Berman Museum launched its newest exhibit Thursday, February 6th, titled mother mold: a cosmogony. Artist nichola kinch delivers a piece described as “a reflection on the birth of a universe.” Her collection of works tells a story of creation, “unfolding without boundaries and inviting questions about the perceptions and frameworks that define us,” as detailed on the Berman’s website. Students Emelia Bowen, Hayden James, and Caroline Tilson curated the exhibition as members of the 2024-25 Museum Studies Curatorial Practice Seminar. This exhibition will be featured at the Berman until May 18th, giving the Ursinus Community plenty of time to come visit!
“The Curatorial Practices seminar is the capstone experience for students in the interdisciplinary Museum Studies program and provides hands-on experiential learning and skills building for work in the arts and culture sector,” states Professor Deborah Barkun, teacher of the course and Director of The Berman Museum of Art. Students spent two weeks in the month of January curating the exhibit in the upper gallery of the Berman. Bowen ‘27 described her experience, explaining, “We painted, installed, and learned about what goes into creating an art exhibit. We got to assemble and install the sculptures and had tons of creative freedom to ‘organize’ the gallery. This was after an entire semester of learning about curating and familiarizing ourselves with [kinch’s] work.”
The piece involves an abstract landscape, shaped through a variety of media including drawing, printmaking, and sculptural manipulation of glass, water, wax, silicone, and metal to shape forms, “both raw and refined.” This transformation of material states allows viewers to imagine a world beyond the societal norm, letting thoughts and ideas flow freely (Kinch’s propensity for questioning norms is reflected in her choices not to capitalize her name or the title of her exhibit). A “mother mold,” in sculptural terms, gives structure and support to the casting process, letting multiple impressions be made from it. In this particular exhibit, Kinch has cast rocks from wax, resulting in, as detailed in the exhibition’s description, “a geology of solidity, grandeur, and timelessness.”
An interesting aspect of the mother mold itself is the feature of a hollow interior. According to kinch’s description of the piece, this structure “testifies to the act of fabrication; our world may be a product of physical and elemental interactions, but also of the social and environmental agency we hold as its stewards and inhabitants. In this cosmogony—an alternate interpretation of our universe—processes of making invite self-reflection, offering new ways to understand the forces that shape us, our connections to each other, and our roles in conceiving a hopeful future.”
kinch, with the help of the student curators, gives the Ursinus Community a chance to appreciate and understand the origin of a universe, in something as simple as glass, water, and wax.