Mother Tongue

The final exhibition in our 2026 Cohort Showcase, Mother Tongue is a group exhibition presented by Hammerspace Gallery featuring Helen Hunter and Melissa Floyd.

Every language makes some experiences easier to describe.

Others begin to disappear.

Before we learn to explain ourselves, we make marks.

Before we learn to conceal discomfort, the body speaks.

Throughout the exhibition, experiences that resist translation remain insistently present. The body refuses to become an obedient vessel. Sensation exceeds explanation. Flesh carries histories words cannot hold. Elsewhere, fleeting gestures become expansive abstractions, honoring a visual language often dismissed before we have truly learned to see it.

These works do not seek resolution. They remain with what cannot be neatly articulated: pain, instinct, memory, attention. They ask what is lost when experience is exchanged too quickly for explanation.

Not everything asks to be understood.

Some things ask to be inhabited.

Language was never our mother tongue.