Clémence Hémard-Hermitant’s recent digital residency with A David Bomberg Legacy – The Sarah Rose Collection offered a deeply personal and radical engagement with the archive. Responding to the work of Dorothy Mead, an artist whose singular voice was shaped by post-war British modernism, Hémard-Hermitant has produced a body of digital drawings that explore the intersections of caregiving, motherhood, and feminist resistance.
For Hémard-Hermitant, this residency marked a shift. Known for her gestural work with oil pastels, chalk, and ink, the artist approached the archive under altered circumstances: the birth of her second child had changed both the constraints on her time and use of materials. Turning to digital tools, she asked whether the texture, movement, and embodied energy of traditional mark-making could be meaningfully translated through an iPad screen. The result is a series of quietly powerful images that echo Mead’s expressive figures and emotive palette while speaking to the rhythms and ruptures of maternal life.
What emerged from Hémard-Hermitant’s time in the archive was an unexpected kinship with Dorothy Mead, not only in visual language but in spirit. Mead’s refusal to conform, her uncompromising stance against gendered expectations (famously declining to take a course at the Slade, forfeiting her diploma in the process), resonated strongly with Hémard-Hermitant. “She challenged traditional roles,” the artist notes, “and as both an artist and a mother, I find that challenge still very real and relevant today.”
Drawing from works such as Standing Female Figure (1962), Reclining Nude, and Self Portrait (1963), Hémard-Hermitant began to reflect on the cyclical journey of the female body: solitude, pregnancy, birth, caregiving, return. Repetition became a compositional strategy, with many of her digital drawings featuring mirrored or doubled figures: motifs of care, interdependence, and transformation.
“I was particularly inspired by how Dorothy Mead often suggested figures in her paintings,” she reflects. “I’ve been thinking deeply about how the body becomes a vehicle for care—not only in motherhood but in how we attend to others, young and old.” This led Hémard-Hermitant to use her own body as subject, turning toward self-portraiture for the first time in her practice. In doing so, she connects with Mead’s own exploration of the self, layering contemporary experiences of maternal identity over modernist expressions of form and gesture.
Despite its unfamiliarity, the digital medium offered a compelling, if occasionally unsettling, way of working. “It replicates the medium well,” Hémard-Hermitant explains, “but you don’t get the same energy release as you would with paper.” This tension between the immediacy of digital tools and the emotional resonance of physical mark-making infuses the residency work with a particular kind of intimacy. The digital figure, rendered with delicacy and nuance, still carries the weight of lived experience.
This project sits within a growing movement of feminist digital practice, one that reclaims archives not only as sites of historical knowledge but as spaces for situated reflection and care. By engaging with Mead’s legacy through the lens of her own maternal experience, Hémard-Hermitant opens up new ways of thinking about female creativity, refusal, and endurance.
What does it mean to inhabit an archive? Not just to interpret its contents, but to live through them, shape them, and be changed by them? In this residency, Hémard-Hermitant offers one compelling answer: a practice rooted in attention, textured by care, and charged with the quiet persistence of the double figure.
You can see the full body of work here.