Honoring connection and care, More Love Hours’ objects are joyful and whimsical, embracing the immediacy of touch and manipulation. Like relationships, they are unexpected, wonky, awkward, exuberant, and unbalanced. They are unabashedly hand-made and deskilled, embracing success and failure through play and experimentation.

More Love Hours is a collaboration between Meredith Mowder and her two young children. With an undergraduate degree in Studio Art and Art History from Skidmore College, and a doctorate in Art History from the CUNY Graduate Center, Meredith has spent the last twenty years in academia, teaching and writing.

She came to clay through play–specifically, filling the hours with her young children. For her, art-making, care-taking, and motherhood have feverishly collided. Her practice considers these forms of labor that are deeply generative but often invisible. As a full-time care-taker, she feels this invisibility acutely.  

“More Love Hours,” is a name borrowed from the artwork More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid (1987), by Mike Kelley (1954-2012). The piece is a large wall-hanging consisting of once-loved but now discarded hand-made stuffed-animals and baby blankets Kelley collected from thrift-shops. These thoughtfully-made objects are physical manifestations of “love hours,” units of labor rooted in care rather than capital in an economy that eschews any traditional rules of exchange; the love may or may not be reciprocated, recognized, or “repaid,” but does that even matter for labors of love? Through ceramics, Meredith seeks to make these love-hours seen and celebrated.