Maternal Torah

Jacqueline Nicholls was one of the exhibitors in Schmatte Couture (2008), curated for Ben Uri at the Rivington Gallery, Shoreditch by contemporary artist Sarah Lightman, featuring 16 international contemporary artists dealing with issues surrounding clothing, memory, gender and identity. The location in Rivington Street was particularly apt as a once thriving centre where sweatshops employed waves of first generation immigrant communities – in turn, Jewish, Indian and Bangladeshi.

Maternal Torah (Torat Imecha), together with Nicholls’ related work, The Yeshiva Inside (Yeshiva Bifnim), merges the forms of a corset and a Sefer Torah (scroll) cover. Jewish tradition sees the Torah as a feminine object. These corset/Torah hybrids explore this concept by highlighting the womanly aspects of the cover, as well as the beauty and constraints of Halacha (Jewish Law). The Yeshiva Inside is a ‘pregnant’ Sefer Torah cover, inspired by a Talmudic passage that describes a foetus being taught Torah in the womb; at birth, forgetting what it has learnt, it spends its life trying to remember. In the work, the mother’s body has been transformed into a primal place of personal revelation.

More recently, this work was included in the exhibition 'The Female Side of God' held at the Jewish Museum Hohenems in collaboration with the Jewish Museum Frankfurt in 2017.