Elise Racine

'Endless Embrace' is a video work exploring the never-ending demands placed on mothers: to comfort, hold, protect, and provide. A mother cradles her child within a swirling, repeating pattern, evoking the endless, self-sacrificial cycles of maternal labor. The central figures remain largely still and unaltered while the world around them shifts and transforms—mirroring the experience of caregiving as a fixed, invisible constant within a relentlessly changing and often destabilizing world.

The work was inspired in part by Gustav Klimt's The Kiss—an image that is itself tender, rapturous, overwhelming, and discomforting with the figure of the woman both embraced and subsumed. Additionally, I drew inspiration from the iconographic tradition of the Madonna and Child, those representations of maternal love as sacred, selfless, and eternal. 

I began with a historical public domain painting, which was digitally collaged and manipulated to create the source image. This human-made, historically layered material was then processed through Kaiber, an AI-powered video generation platform built on Stable Diffusion, using iterative prompt construction and image-to-video synthesis.

The source image already carries an unsettling quality: its repeating, kaleidoscopic pattern feels almost disembodied and obsessive—an attempt at capturing something true about the experience of caregiving that a purely tender image wouldn't. Stable Diffusion inherits and amplifies that uncanniness rather than smoothing it into something more palatable. Generative AI tends to aestheticize and sentimentalize depictions of women and motherhood, resolving complexity into comfort. Here the opposite happens. The 'endless embrace' becomes simultaneously sublime and unnerving. At moments the figures dissolve into something almost floral and transcendent; at others the pattern becomes even more spectral and relentless. It is both beautiful and difficult to look at, much like caregiving itself.

There is an additional layer of critique embedded in the medium: using these same tools that so often flatten and misrepresent women to foreground maternal labor—constant, so frequently uncredited, and profoundly world-shaping—turns the technology against its own tendencies. That the source material draws on historical painting compounds this: the erasure of women's labor is not new, and neither is its representation through male-dominated artistic traditions.

The repeating textile-like aesthetic references craft traditions historically associated with women's work, while the looping video format reinforces the cyclical, unending nature of caregiving. The source image was exhibited in LABOR, a 2026 virtual exhibition at Hera Gallery exploring the invisible labor most often designated to those assigned female at birth.