Interim - An exhibition by Studio 11

Zion Yaynu

When Zion Yaynu began working on Interim, the structure of her days had completely changed. Time no longer arrived in long uninterrupted stretches. The studio was no longer separate from life outside it. Paintings started between feedings, during naps, in the short windows before attention had to shift elsewhere. You can feel that shift inside the work immediately.

The paintings move differently. Gestures pause and resume. Layers feel compressed, urgent, built through accumulation rather than endless revision. Some marks look interrupted halfway through thought. Others feel instinctive, made quickly because there was no luxury of waiting for the perfect moment. The rhythm of the work mirrors the rhythm of early motherhood itself, fragmented, repetitive, exhausting, intimate.

So much of the language around motherhood still frames it through disappearance. The artist disappears into caregiving. The individual dissolves into responsibility. Creative ambition becomes secondary, indulgent, or impossible. Zion’s work pushes against that assumption firmly.

The exhibition by studio 11 focuses on the unstable period between identities, the space between who she was before becoming a mother and who she is now becoming through it. Interim names that condition directly. An interim is temporary, but it is also consequential. It is not absent. It is a transition.

What makes the work compelling is that it avoids turning motherhood into spectacle. There is no attempt to romanticize exhaustion or dramatize sacrifice. Instead, the paintings stay close to the texture of ordinary days, where joy, frustration, tenderness, repetition, and limitation exist side by side. The work trusts those smaller emotional realities enough to let them carry weight on their own.

The art world still often rewards uninterrupted productivity, visibility, and total devotion to practice. Interim exposes how unrealistic that expectation can be, particularly during major life changes. But instead of framing interruption as failure, Zion absorbs it into the structure of the work itself.

These paintings are not evidence that Zion managed to “balance everything perfectly.” The exhibition is stronger than that narrative. It argues for something more honest, that identity survives through adaptation. That creative practice changes form depending on the conditions surrounding it. That continuing at all can become an act of definition.

By the end of the exhibition, what remains is not the idea of disappearance, but persistence. The understanding that when life changes, the question is not whether you remain yourself. The question becomes how you protect space for that self to continue existing. And through Interim, Zion Yaynu answers that question with clarity.

You can find more information about the current exhibition and the artworks on display on the studio 11 website.