The Maternal in Creative Work

Intergenerational Discussions on Motherhood and Art

Elena Marchevska, Valerie Walkerdine, Elena Marchevska, Valerie Walkerdine

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781032082196
• eBook ISBN: 9781351209823
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The Maternal in Creative Work examines the interrelation between art, creativity and maternal experience, inviting international artists, theorists and cultural workers to discuss their approaches to the central feminist question of the relation between maternity, generation and creativity.

This edited collection explores various modes and forms of art practice which look at mothers as subjects and as artists of the maternal experience, and how the creative practice is used to accept, negotiate, resist or challenge traditional conceptions of mothering. The book brings together some of the major projects of maternal art from the last two decades and opens up new ways of conceptualizing motherhood as a creative and communicative practice. Chapters include intergenerational discussion of art practices in the 20th and 21st centuries, representations of breastfeeding and infertility in creative projects, the notion of the 'unfit mother' and childlessness, together with the experiences of women and men that take on maternal identities through many forms of kinship and social mothering.

The Maternal in Creative Work will be essential reading for interdisciplinary students and scholars in cultural studies, gender studies and art theory and will have wider appeal to audiences interested in maternity, childcare, creativity and psychoanalysis.

1 Maternal art practice

An emerging field of artistic enquiry into motherhood, care and time

Elena Marchevska

Defining/being defined by maternal

In 2007 I gave birth to my first child in a run-down state hospital in Eastern Europe. It was a swelteringly hot summer day and she arrived in the early hours of the morning. In the haze of delivering a child into this world, many things passed me by. However, I still remember clearly that as soon as she was handed to me, my name disappeared, and everybody started to call me the ‘mother’. It is a common practice in the area where I come from: you are referred as ‘mother’ even by closest family members. Suddenly there are no other parts of your identity that matter except your biological function – mother of a newborn child. At first, I almost didn’t notice this sudden change; it might have been the tiredness and confusion that come with early motherhood. But then I was reawakened by one of my dearest friends, who was going through multiple rounds of IVF treatment at the time. She was the only one to call me by my first name and that sounded both familiar, comforting and incredibly respectful. Also, it reminded me that both of us were defined by our (in)ability to deal with and uphold the traditional patriarchal assumptions concerning motherhood and mothering. Our thinking and personal understanding of the maternal was pushed back, silenced, unimportant. The world, at that moment, needed me to be just simply a ‘mother’.

As my co-editor Valerie Walkerdine notes in the preamble to this book, the maternal is central to each and every one of our lives; whether we are/aren’t or have/haven’t been mothers, the maternal in all its forms enters our lives in many ways. This has been argued by feminist scholars since the ’60s, as elaborated by Trebilcot, who claims that

mothering is central for every woman in patriarchy, whether or not we bear or care for children, and that an understanding of mothering, both as it exists in patriarchy and as it might exist (if at all) in women-centred communities, is central to feminist theorizing. I realized that, whether or not one is a mother, mothering is a necessary focus for work in feminist theory.

(1984: vii)

As Walkerdine and Trebilcot astutely observe, even when women decide to make choices about their lives and their reproductive activities, that decision seems to be brought back to their attention on numerous occasions and in many different ways throughout their adult lives. Women may want to mother and have children but may not be able to for various medical or personal reasons. Women are still paying the ‘motherhood tax’ and are being reprimanded because at job interviews and in promotion situations, panels assume they might become mothers and have (multiple) children. Women don’t want to have children. Women want to leave their role as mother and consequently their children. There are many ways that women relate to the maternal, although in mainstream culture there is still a big assumption that women should have children and there is only one ‘proper way’ to make and execute that decision. As Rebecca Solnit notes, the ‘mother’ question that women receive is a ‘closed’ question,

[a] question to which there is only one right answer, at least as far as the interrogator is concerned. These are questions that push you into the herd or nip at you for diverging from it, questions that contain their own answer and whose aim is enforcement and punishment.

(2017: 5)

Questions that can never be answered in the right way, questions that can only be answered with open questions – as Solnit inquires: ‘Would you ask a man that?’ (2017: 5).

Maternal art argument

This edited collection explores, challenges and critiques various modes and forms of art practice which deal with the maternal. We invited artists, theorists and cultural workers to discuss their approach to what Sarah Ruddick (1989) calls ‘maternal thinking’, a unity of reflection, judgment and emotion about motherhood. The collection also addresses what Ruddick has always contested, that there is a profound need for sustained political and intellectual effort before maternal thinking can be heard and acknowledged in the public domain. So, ultimately, this edited collection seeks to understand how art allows practitioners to reimagine the processes that solidify the mother as metaphor and trope in culture. Maternal art practice is an encompassing term that I use to describe a set of art practices which explore, reflect and critique the dominant cultural notion of motherhood and the role of ‘the mother’ in contemporary art practice. I believe that maternal art practice is opening up new territories where artists can productively contribute to a wider set of political and philosophical discussions on care, labour and time. I have been inspired and empowered to use this term through dialogue with numerous practitioners and thinkers who have explored the intersections between art and the maternal over the last two decades (Liss, 2009; Chernick and Klein, 2011; Epp Buller, 2012; Loveless, 2016; Donoghue, 2013; Bright, 2013; Irvin, 2016; Šimić and Underwood-Lee, 2017). As argued by Rachel Epp Buller, the maternal perspective is certainly lacking in mainstream art education, and examples of work that engage with the political and conceptual weight of the maternal are rarely present, even in feminist art and art history classes (2016). In her monumental work Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, Adrienne Rich asserts that feminist mothering seeks to reclaim power for mothers, to imagine and implement a mode of mothering that mitigates the many ways that patriarchal motherhood, both discursively and materially, regulates and restrains mothers and their mothering. She posits that it is the institution of motherhood that feminists should challenge and change and not the experience of mothering itself. Regrettably, mainstream art education still fails to grasp this important distinction between the institution and the experience of mothering. Even more, we often see how motherhood as institution is used to challenge any attempts to explore non-biological maternal subjectivities in art.¹

With this collection, I want to propose that maternal art practice genuinely and profoundly embodies maternal thinking. The collection reflects on two decades of sustained (though sometimes in appearance sporadic) international, intergenerational dialogue between artists, academics and philosophers that draw on Ruddick’s ‘maternal thinking’ proposition and extends it in multiple directions. This territory was explored in depth for the first time theoretically by Andrea Liss’s ‘Feminist art and the maternal’, where she extended maternal thinking into ‘thinking (m)otherwise’. This concept was certainly formative for an emerging generation of young artists across the world, as is clearly visible from some of the contributions in this book. Liss not only validates the maternal as a mode of thinking and creating within feminist art practice but comprehensively brings to the forefront less-known (or perhaps hidden) artwork by feminist artists who use their practice to analyse how motherhood has been and is perceived and pictured.

Therefore, this collection brings together some of the major projects and contributions to the field of maternal art from the last two decades and reflects too on influences and possible new directions in the field. As editor, I want to propose a shift from discussions about motherhood and art, to discussions about maternal art as field of study. This shift is partially based on Lisa Baraitser’s observation that ‘the mother’ is the impossible subject par excellence. As Baraitser argues, ‘the mother’ is always caught in the gap between and is both idealized and denigrated in contemporary culture. Part object, part subject within Western philosophy, ‘the mother’, Baraitser asserts, in some sense is everywhere: ‘our culture saturated with her image and yet she remains a shadowy figure who seems to disappear from the many discourses that explicitly try to account for her’ (2008: 4). Baraitser also acknowledges, in her seminal work Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption, that by using anecdotal theory and feminist autobiographical writing, she is capable of discussing (her own) encounter with maternal subjectivity and of keeping the maternal experience in sight. This creative, messy written witnessing strategy, as Baraitser suggests, is something that many women use to allow maternal subjectivity to emerge in the work and form/materialise as a maternal creative practice. For me, the encounter with the maternal through art is something that allows an interruption of the wider cultural discourse on ‘motherhood’. The messiness of maternal art is something that allows art practitioners to explore every aspect of maternity and reclaim the importance of the mundane and usually overlooked moments of maternal experience. In many examples of maternal art practice we see a form of maternal subjectivity emerging, as Baraitser (2008: 4) argues, characterized by physical viscosity,² heightened sentience,³ a renewed awareness of objects,⁴ of artists’ own emotional range and emotional points of weakness,⁵ an engagement with the built environment,⁶ a renewed temporal awareness where the present is elongated and the past and the future no longer felt to be so tangible⁷ and a renewed sense of oneself as a speaking subject.⁸ Maternal art practice by default deals with what Sara Ahmed calls the ‘sweaty concept’, a concept that ‘comes out of a bodily experience that is difficult, one that is “trying” and where the aim is to keep exploring and exposing this difficulty’ (2014). This collection acknowledges the difficulty of talking about maternal art practice and therefore celebrates the movement of artists who consciously claim back, investigate, question and deconstruct maternal subjectivity. With their practice, the artists and contributors to this book realign and reclaim a space in the wider discourse of art history, left unfilled and unacknowledged for a very long time.

The maternal mode of thinking: intergenerational collaboration as mode of existence

As elaborated previously, the main aim of this edited collection is to present and foster examples of intergenerational dialogue on the maternal and art. Most of the contributors use art examples to explore various perspectives on the maternal. The collection builds on Jacqueline Rose’s question: ‘what does thinking about mothers do to thinking?’ (1996: 413). The aim of the collection is to look beyond biological motherhood and present experiences that explore creatively encounters with infertility, medical intervention, adoption and fostering, queer mothering and childlessness by choice or not. With this, I want to acknowledge that the structuring of the collection was impacted by previous feminist scholarship on concepts surrounding the maternal. As O’Barr et al. argue, the greatest impact of feminist scholarship on concepts of mothering

has been to divest them of their biological or moral agency, univocally expressed, outside of time and history, and to demonstrate the importance of understanding mothering within a dynamic, interactive context of social, political, historical and sexual factors, multicultured, multiracial, and multivoiced.

(1990: 3)

Therefore, the collection also brings contributions that explore the creative embodiment of intergenerational trauma and the complex territory of mother-daughter relationships and maternal ambivalence. The book also addresses the silence imposed upon the maternal in the Western art tradition. It considers the articulation of multiple maternal subjectivities and offers the possibility of theorising women’s voices out of the silence to which they have been consigned by a philosophical and artistic tradition that privileges male creativity over female reproduction. The maternal mode of thinking and creating art which I propose is deeply informed by intergenerational dialogue between artists concerned with working through/towards maternal subjectivities. As Šimić and Underwood-Lee assert: ‘As feminist artist/mothers we are standing beside our feminist (grand) mothers’ (2016: 7). There is also an emergence of an unprecedented collaborative ethos and dialogue in maternal art practices, which this collection modestly acknowledges and addresses. Many chapters (to be precise, seven) were co-written or emerged in ideological/conceptual collaboration with our foremothers in spirit. Many of the co-authored chapters speak directly to the potential of sharing this practice as a mode of existing. Many of the artists and academics featured here came together physically as well, to discuss maternal art practice during various local and international events and gatherings.⁹ Co-authorship also allows liberalisation of the author’s voice, the eradication of the ‘one who knows everything’. It disseminates knowledge and allows different subjectivities to engage in a messy dialogue about maternal experience. Rich and Arcana suggested early in their work on motherhood that women’s bonding is a potential solution to the oppressive nature of motherhood as an institution. The hope is that this collection will nurture a fertile ground for future discussions about how we analyse and speak about maternal subjectivities within art practice and education.

The collection also attempts to offer an overview of important art exhibitions and projects that have shaped the field in the last two decades.

I have tried to capture a maternal mode of artistic work which is deeply informed by intergenerational dialogue between practitioners on maternal subjectivity. This approach is informed by Paula McCloskey’s proposition on art-encounter as a formative element of maternal art practice (based on her first encounter with Louise Bourgeois’s art while being a single mother herself) (2013). The collection therefore emphasises the need to reclaim and acknowledge intergenerational influence and to discuss the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures and plates
• List of contributors
• Foreword by Lisa Baraitser
• Preamble by Valerie Walkerdine
• 1 Maternal art practice: an emerging field of artistic enquiry into motherhood, care and time
• Part I Intergenerational maternal discussions
• Part II Encountering the maternal in artistic practice
• Part III Maternal future: Interrupting the field
• Afterwords: mothering the future
• Index