Tag Archives: mother artist

Reconciling Art and Mothering

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The book Reconciling Art and Mothering, containing an essay I wrote in 2009, just came out.

It’s encouraging to see this important issue taken up by younger artists. When I left art school many, many years ago I wasn’t even sure that artist mothers existed. Although numerous changes have taken place since then, women who combine these two roles continue to face numerous challenges.

The theoretical approaches and narratives of artist mothers’ lived experience collected within Reconciling Art and Mothering will help us re-conceive our understanding of both maternity and art making.

Virtue + terror

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In motherhood I have experienced myself as both more virtuous and terrible, and more implicated too in the world’s virtue and terror, than I would from the anonymity of childlessness have thought possible.

—Rachel Cusk, A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother

I resent the pervasive sentimentality often associated with babies and their care. It may the most difficult work I’ve undertaken in my life. The daily minutiae of caring for a baby forcibly reiterates both the power and powerlessness experienced within the maternal role. Elsewhere in her remarkable book Rachel Cusk writes, “…motherhood is a career in conformity from which no amount of subterfuge can liberate the soul without violence.”

Drawing and reality

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As I return to my studio work I find myself struggling (once again) with the difference between drawing and reality. Although I make drawings of real people, what I draw is not real.

In his book Playing and Reality psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott discusses the creative possibilities inherent in the interchange between inner and outer realities. The mother (or other caregiver) creates a “holding environment” for the baby’s earliest exploration of these realities. The holding environment (hopefully) provides care and protection as needed. Within this space the child uses play to negotiate the differences and similarities between their perceptions and the external world. The transitional experience of play allows the child, the individual, to discover themselves as they adapt to the world.

Like play, artworks function within this transitional space and represents a link between our inner psychic reality and the outer world. Art making (and looking at art) provides an opportunity to function in the indeterminate zone between the inner world of the psyche and outer reality.

So when we think and talk about art it’s important not to confuse artworks with reality. Artworks are marked by the psyche of the artist and interpreted in and through the perceptions of the viewer. They do not represent reality, they represent the transitional zone between a number of different realities.

I recently encountered an excellent reminder of the difference beween art and reality in an anecdote described by the artist Marlene Dumas: “Someone was interested in these smaller paintings of a naked young girl, and asked, ‘What is the age of the child?’ I said, ‘It’s not a child, it’s a painting.’”*

Can I allow myself to fall into the transitional space of creativity as I produce these drawings based on photographs of my children? As I draw can I relieve myself of the responsibility I feel towards them in real life?

* From the essay “Less Dead” by Richard Schiff, in the catalogue Marlene Dumas: Measuring Your Own Grave published by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2008.

Reconciling Art and Motherhood book

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Toss, 1999

Having sent off my completed essay for the Mothering Canada book, I’ve been working on a major revision of my essay for the Reconciling Art and Motherhood book, being edited by Rachel Epp Buller (Bethel College) for Ashgate publishers.

My essay, “Exquisite Tension: The Annotated Artist Mother” looks at three installations I produced over a 15 year period that represent the dynamic interplay between my role as an artist and my role as a mother.

As usual, the experience of writing  has deepened my understanding of my life and work. Here’s an excerpt:

My work as an artist emerges in response to the circumstances of my life, although the work is not specifically autobiographical. I explore the tension between the role of the (female) artist and the demands of the everyday. Much of the work I produce represents the ambivalence I feel in relation to ideas and images of what I am supposed to be. My ambivalence is a useful motivator in the development of my work. I want to be a good artist, I want to be a good mother, but how I function within these roles rarely matches the cultural narratives and expectations that I encounter. Images of artists and mothers that circulate within popular culture don’t represent my experience. In fact, they often contradict it. In spite of this they continue to affect my self-esteem. As an artist I’ve learned to pay attention to circumstances that both engage and repel me. The oscillation between these competing responses suggests creative possibilities. It is not my intent to propose better, more realistic images of what it means to be an artist or mother within my work. Rather than trying to fix meaning, my work interrogates its construction. The form and content of my work acknowledges my belief that meaning is provisional.

Image: Toss, 1999, graphite on existing wall.

Mothering Canada book

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I’m doing the last read-through of my essay and organizing my images for the Mothering Canada: Interdisciplinary Voices anthology that is expected to come out this fall. It’s being published by Demeter Press (York University) for the Association for Research on Mothering at the University of Regina (ARM-UR).

This is a different essay than the one I’ve previously described for the artist mother anthology. The Mothering Canada essay is called, “Representing Maternal Ambivalence: A Process of Surrender and Withdrawal.” It’s based on an artist talk I gave in 1999 discussing the strategies I developed to fulfil the roles of both an artist and mother. It also describes a number of artworks representing the maternal ambivalence I’ve experienced within this complicated circumstance.

02baby-food-89

Excerpt from the installation Baby Food, 1989. Installation in the group show Mothers of Invention at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Geneva, N.Y. Graphite on existing walls.