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Potatoe peeling protest

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Celeste Coetzee

FRANSCHHOEK, South Africa, November 28 - Celeste Coetzee's work Bridal Ontklee (Bridal Strip) has been removed from The Gallery at Grande Provence in Franschhoek, by curator Carina Bekker. Coetzee's performance / installation at The Gallery at Grand Provence was part of the Unisa (University of South Africa) Final Year Student Exhibition there.

HUGUENOT MONUMENT, Franschhoek, December 3 - free speech advocates gathered today in a potato peeling protest of Bekker's banning of Coetzee's work.

In the original Gallery at Grand Provence installation Coetzee sat, topless for the first two days and later dressed in traditional Voortrekker (South African immigrant / pioneers of the 1830's & 40's) clothing, under wall text that read, Wives, respect your husbands, submit to your husbands. Critiquing patriarchal society in general and specifically Faith Like Potatoes author, evangelist Angus Buchan, Coetzee sat in the installation peeling potatoes and tearing pages from The Bible.

It is unfortunate that having work censored is such an effective way for an artist's work to reach a wider audience, but that is the reality of a media culture where curators and institutions claim ignorance of their confederate role as perception & attention manipulators. In this case, Bekker's ban of Coetzee's culture critique has viralized it and taken the dialog about patriarchal culture and faith-based oppression to a wider audience.

Curator Bekker has stated that gallery patrons were very upset by the work - in some contexts the sign of a successful exhibition! - and that this figured into her decision to remove the work. It can be easy to condemn Bekker in a situation like this, and in fact I do, but we should also recognize the remarkable amount of hate a public that doesn't take the time to understand a work of art can generate. It is truly devastating to realize how happy people can be to be uninformed. It makes me wonder about our future. In her remarkable book Dearest Tinkebell, Dutch artist Tinkebell documents some of the extraordinarily hateful mail people who appear to not understand her work have sent her.

Even though I do think Bekker's choice was a poor one, we can't ignore the possibly real pressure an outraged community can bring to bear. Tinkebell's solution was probably better than Bekker's: whenever possible, producing a book is probably a better response to outrage than censoring art.

LINKS

* Celeste Coetzee / The Star
* Celeste Coetzee / Tonight News
* Saturday Protest / Cape Times
*Faith Like Potatoes / Wikipedia
* Celeste Coetzee / Jacaranda FM interview
* Facebook Page supporting Coetzee
* Potato Peeling Event / Facebook
* "Dearest Tinkebell"

I love Coetzee's work and I love the community response to it being censored. But I do have to say, for myself, I actually prefer to eat potatoes with the skin still on!

Click on any thumbnail below to enter "slide show" mode, then use your arrow keys to scroll through the images.

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FRANSCHHOEK, South Africa, November 28 - Celeste Coetzee's work Bridal Ontklee (Bridal Strip) has been removed from The Gallery at Grande Provence in Franschhoek, by curator Carina Bekker. Coetzee's performance / installation at The Gallery at Grand Provence was part of the Unisa (University of South Africa) Final Year Student Exhibition there.

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There have been moments when I have actually glimpsed my mother and understood her to be a person entirely separate from me. Watching her accept an award when I was a teenager in front of a room of well-dressed people sitting in front of hotel salads of iceberg lettuce. Seeing her dance, her lips slightly pursed, her skirt always long, always swooshing. The annual moment when she would load magazines, vodka, and Diet Coke into the back of her Jeep Cherokee and drive away for a weekend alone in a cabin.

I'm struck by the power and, perhaps related, paucity of these moments. There are so few of them. Even now, 37 years into knowing her, it's like I can't totally see her. I'm too close. It's like I am a museum wanderer standing far too close to a large-scale abstract painting that I'm madly in love with. If only I could step back and take it in, in its entirety. I'm stuck studying an inch at a time.

If only I could look at my mom as she is, rather than as a psychic's prediction of what I might become. Or a generational spell to break. Or a saint to worship. Or a wound to heal. It's all so confusing, so muddled. I'm old enough to understand that it's so much more about me than her.

It has me wondering: Can a child - a daughter, especially - ever acknowledge the real interior life of a mother?

It's an important question for me as I try to grow an adult relationship - sometimes soaringly, sometimes fumblingly - with my own mother. And it's an important question for me as I contemplate my fate as the mother of two daughters. Someday, will they have the same struggle? Will they even be interested in who I am? Will they know how to stand back and see me? Does it matter?

I don't even see myself accurately. I will be sitting in the dark, nursing my youngest, and suddenly realize that I am her mother. That I have been a mother for almost four years now. I am someone's mother, I'll say in my head. It sounds preposterous, even as I have been covered in milk and shit and vomit all these years, even as I have been lugging these little girls all over the country, even as I have learning what cries are just the last brief rebellions against much-needed sleep and which ones are inconsolable without my touch.

I have so much subtle intelligence about keeping tiny humans alive that I never had before. My body has transformed - twice over with pregnancy, but also after; I've grown impressive biceps after carrying 25-pound babies up and down stairs. Somehow, I am still catching up to the idea that I am a mother, that I have earned those sacred stripes.

So I can't quite see myself as a mother and I can't quite see my own mother as anything else.

It's particularly strange that I can't own the mother thing when my experience of life right now is so defined by it. When I am with my daughters, and I am with them a lot, I feel like myself but a little muted. I can't actually hear many of my own desires or needs because their desires and needs scream so loud. Which is fine. They're still so young. I know it's temporary. This is why I take long showers whenever I get the chance/go insane. I let the hot water pelt my shoulders and try to hear myself think and feel again. What do you want? I ask myself. Sometimes I have no answers, but the dark and the water and the shut door is enough to restore something inside of me that allows me to smile genuinely when Maya, my three-year-old, comes into the bathroom while I'm drying my body and stares at me as if studying and then asks if she can put on lotion with me.

The other day she asked me, out of the blue, "Why do you have to work?" And I said, "Because everything in this house costs money. And because I like to work." I knew money was too abstract a concept for her, still, and that she was really asking, "Why is there ever anything else that pulls you away from me?"

Which is a form of "Who are you when you're not with me?" Or maybe even, "Why does a you that's not my mother exist?"

At the time, I felt a little irritated. She's so clingy these days. She makes goodbyes so hard and sad. I just want to be able to leave sometimes without steeling myself for disappointing her. I want to become my not-mother self without feeling like I'm injuring her.

Thinking about it later, I empathized with the inquiry. It's not just about wanting your mom. It's a conceptual challenge. Maybe she's just starting to stand dumbly before the painting that I am.

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There have been moments when I have actually glimpsed my mother and understood her to be a person entirely separate from me. Watching her accept an award when I was a teenager in front of a room of well-dressed people sitting in front of hotel salads of iceberg lettuce.

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peeling potatoes

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Julia Wójcik, "Peeling potatoes", 2001, Zachęta National Gallery of Art, photo: Jacek Niegoda

Julita Wójcik is an artist who often refers to the stereotype of so-called women's work - gardening, knitting, peeling potatoes...

With the exception of military service, peeling potatoes is regarded to as a typically female activity - particularly in Poland, where the starchy, tuberous veggie is staple of the national diet and where the rules of the 'toilet' segregation (boys to the left, girls to the right) translates into gender roles. 'Boys' work on their own little manly projects or lay on the couch and watch TV, while 'girls' do the laundry, iron shirts, sew on buttons, sweep the floors of a playhouse, wash the windows, scrub the sinks, tubs, toilets and stoves, vacuum the rugs, do the groceries, feed their family, pay the bills, take care of their children's health, their clothes, education, nutrition, behavior, discipline, morale and finally - they peel potatoes.

This image is not only a major component of the national culture, but also a tangible memories, remembered from childhood, where a mother would always bustle around between the kitchen and her favorite TV show. In Poland, where after the war the role of the so-called fairer sex was never limited just to a typical 'Hausfrau', women had two jobs - at work and at home.

"Despite the poor situation on the labor market, Polish women have had a historical experience of activity. In Poland, where a middle class never came about, there was a obvious division on a economic-gender basis; women never felt trapped in the sphere of their home as they did in the West or in USA" - wrote Magdalena Środa.

Yet they also never actually disengaged from this domestic sphere. And since all traditional polish meals, like pork chops (schabowy), ground pork (mielony), eggs, meat stew (bigos), ribs and cutlets (bitki) must be served with a side of potatoes, the veggies and the peeling process became permanently rooted in the image of the Polish home. Not to mention the potato pancakes, potato loaf or potato sausage.

In her art, Julita Wójcik often frolics with so-called women's work stereotypes by: tending the garden, crocheting (including a model of the longest apartment building in Poland - Gdańsk's "Waver"), knitting (an irreverent sweater with geometric patterns, taken from the Neoplastic Room designed by Władysław Strzemiński in the Museum of Art in Łódź) or 'painting watercolors'. While in her other works or performances the artist would replicate, sustain or use these 'feminine' activities to create not so feminine objects (architecture, abstract art), one time (and just this one time) she brought her art to the public in a 1:1 form. She brought the act of peeling potatoes from the kitchen to the gallery - not just any random gallery, but Warsaw's prestigious Zachęta National Gallery.

At the beginning of year 2001, Wójcik organised a simple action - performance to accompany the exhibition. She herself called it an "happening". She sat on a stool, dressed in apron and peeled a pile of potatoes. Precisely 50 kilograms. There was the audience, and also journalists and a television crew. And that was it - it was as if the media suddenly became interested in a typical Polish woman and her daily duties. However they would not come in to just any kitchen, the gallery provided the setting that would spur their interest. The setting of the "happening" took place in Zachęta's Small Salon with its somewhat boudoir-palace aesthetics.

"I bring awareness to the fact that today's art is not a sphere separated from reality within museum walls."

The audience would spontaneously help the artist cope with the huge pile of potatoes. Even Zachęta's director Anda Rottenberg joined in, as if emphasising a certain common feature of women's fate, regardless of their status. At the time, Rottenberg was under a constant attack of the media and right wing politicians. It was a time of renowned scandals associated with ruining the works of Piotr Uklański ("Nazis") and Maurizio Cattellan ("La Nona Ora"). Anda Rottenberg experienced an anti-Semitic bashing. At this point, even Julita Wójcik's innocent potato peeling was perceived as controversial; the prevailing argument was that it's a waste of the taxpayers' money. Even though that was the ambience of the time, Wójcik's performance became famous and brought attention to a sensitive issue.

"Such everyday activities as cooking, housekeeping, childcare are traditional elements of female identity, and yet in a capitalist-driven society, they are overlooked, marginalised, even ridiculed. Wójcik calls attention back to these seemingly insignificant acts, celebrating the ordinary. She does this in a sensitive, subtle way, never allowing form to overtake the message. Rather than declare war on modern-day injustices, she plays upon innate human emotions, tugging on nostalgic associations of childhood, holidays and the unspoiled countryside - relics in a world of virtual living. She makes use of the symbolism of objects - dolls, stuffed toys, potatoes to make a statement on assigned gender roles and experiences - dress codes, management, computation, analysis vs. cooking, cleaning, knitting, creating.

In the process she uncovers a new, yet altogether familiar, aesthetic and the significance these symbols hold. By marrying stereotypes to real-life issues, she provides an opportunity for society to recognise that there are many modes and alternatives for personal and collective identity."

- Agnieszka Le Nart, Biweekly.pl

Despite appearances, the problem did not concern the issue of what is and what is not art worthy of exhibiting at a national gallery and whether peeling potatoes can hold its own. Defenders of the 'status quo' protested that potatoes belong at home, in the kitchen, by the sink, over a bucket of parings. When brought to the gallery, which is regarded to as a temple, a place endowed with a unique power of sanctifying, it endows the objects the rank of a 'piece of art' rank (relics), the activity became taboo. Potatoes and art (sacred, national) do not go hand in hand. Children in kindergarten can at most make stamps out of a potato.

Feminist art historian Izabela Kowalczyk, ironically wrote: "can peeling potatoes be included in the category of national heritage?". In Wójcik's work she found a feminist gesture,

"indeed it can be linked with the issue of the female-artist's transgression, which for a woman to become an artist in the nineteenth century, she had to contradict the definition of 'femininity', as creating belonged to men, they were the creators of great art. Women primarily focused on taking care of the house, food and embellishing reality."

Furthermore, "Peeling Potatoes" became Wójcik's only work in which - perhaps not entirely intended - she created an atmosphere of a certain pathos. While knitting or cooking she proved that art can be fun, however when taking reality of the so-called women's bustle
to the gallery, she showed that this reality does not become any more bearable in this sphere. Peeling a potato is just that. As if the artists accepted the role of a victim, Cinderella for the last time. But whose victim was she - of the system, patriarchy or the stereotype?

Artur Żmijewski took up a similar subject in one of his recent projects. In each cycle of his short videos "Selected Works" (2007), he created portraits of people performing simple, often unappreciated jobs, among which is a factory worker, a supermarket cashier, a cleaner and a hot-dog seller. They come from Germany, Poland, Mexico and Italy. The films were accused of being boring, showing a normal day of these ordinary characters. Nothing more.

"What they do at home is uninteresting, what they do at work is uninteresting, what they do in their whole life is uninteresting. (...) In this sense, there is absolutely no reason to be interested in them, and certainly there is no reason to make a film about them." - Żmijewski was saying.

But the artist has his reason - he seeks for the "real" life, or rather defuses its myth.

"Peeling Potatoes" was no different. As Anda Rottenberg wrote:

"For a long time Julita Wójcik's activity was not perceived as art - for does it behoove to raise ordinary, everyday tasks performed by millions of women around the world, to the rank of art?"

Author: Karol Sienkiewicz, March 2011. Edited and translated by Sylwia Wojda, July 2011

Julita Wójcik
"Peeling potatoes"
performance at the Zachęta National Galery of Art
Warsaw 2001

Joanna Lenartowicz

Tags: peeling potatoes julita wójcik

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Peeling Potatoes - Julita Wójcik | Photography & Visual Arts w Culture.pl

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Julia Wójcik, "Peeling potatoes", 2001, Zachęta National Gallery of Art, photo: Jacek Niegoda Julita Wójcik is an artist who often refers to the stereotype of so-called women's work - gardening, knitting, peeling potatoes...

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https://www.francesbossom.com/single-post/2017/04/28/Mother

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Recently, I was in New York City to do some publicity, and I was staying in a Holiday Inn in the Gowanus Canal of Brooklyn where the elevator shook and moaned every time we went to our tenth floor room as though the shaft were too small and the elevator was just barely squeezing through. I was certain we were going to die every time we used it. I was there with my mother who was helping me take care of my ten-month-old baby. We flew in, did the galley party, flew out. We were baby-publicity-air-travel ninjas.

Of course flying with a baby is torture. Visiting New York City with a baby is hard. But I breastfeed and my baby doesn't take a bottle well and I couldn't imagine how my husband could take care of the baby at night without me and my mammary glands, and so I brought my mother and my baby with me to New York. As it happened, I also got in touch with a friend I hadn't seen in ten years, and he came to our hotel room to chat with me and see the baby before it was time to go to the party.

It was pure joy to see my friend after so long. Just laying eyes on him made me glad; he had grown a Freddy Mercury mustache and was wearing a weird child's size sweater and I loved every inch of him. Out of our mouths flew sentences too fast to filter, so desperate were we to tell each other everything, to make clear what had happened in the last ten years. I found myself, as I crammed my thighs into my shapewear, saying, "Oh, well, I love my husband, he is the perfect man for me and it was love at first sight, but I would never willingly enter into this state of servitude again."

I had not known that I felt that way until I said it. It frightened me that I said it. That night at the party, I kept thinking about it, and on the flight home, I kept thinking about it, and no matter how I looked at that phrase I couldn't make it any less true. If something disastrous were to happen and my husband were to leave me or die or simply vanish, I would never remarry. I actually cannot imagine even dating another man. Part of this is out of intense loyalty to my husband, but part of it is because the idea of cooking some idiot man dinner for the rest of my life makes my skin prickle with rage.

But how can I be so angry at the idea of cooking dinner for a theoretical and highly imaginary man when I cook dinner for my husband, whom I love, all the time? Do I secretly hate cooking dinner? Do I hate being a wife? Do I hate being a mother?

These are difficult questions for me to consider. I am proud of being a mother. I love my two children. I love them so much that it hurts to look at them and I am pretty sure they are the best, smartest, scrappiest, funniest boys in the world, and having them changed my life. My life before children was selfish and bland, all feelings and no grit, just a drifting miasma of mood. To go back to living like that seems like hell. I get annoyed when women's magazines try to edit my motherhood out of my work. I get depressed when they won't run a piece unless I take out any mention of my having children. I firmly believe that having children has made me smarter and better and more interesting, and fuck you to any women's mag that doesn't think so too.

And yet, I am profoundly unfree.

I have a ten-month-old and a three-and-a-half-year-old. The three-and-a-half-year-old goes to preschool for a good portion of the day, but the preschool isn't state-sponsored, so it eats our entire childcare budget. That means I am home with the ten-month-old full time. This is a luxury. Many women would kill to stay at home with their babies. I am fully aware of this. I try to write when the baby is asleep. He sleeps for about two hours in the morning. Otherwise, throughout the day I do housework, cook, try not to go insane. My husband leaves at five in the morning and gets home at eight in the evening most days, so I am short on adult conversation or help. There is a deep, almost suffocating solitude to my days, and yet there is also the California ocean, the flowers, the breeze. It is lovely; it is intolerable; it is both.

I am tethered by many things: the baby's nursing schedule, the three-year-old's attention span. To read an adult book is out of the question. To sit quietly for a moment with no one touching me is out of the question. To poop alone is out of the question. Showering is something I have to ask my husband for time to do each night. A lot of nights I am too tired to even think about showering and I just go to bed dirty. I do not brush my hair every day because what does it matter if my hair is brushed? It is possible I am clinically depressed. It is also possible that taking care of small children is just really hard, and in the last six months we have had a move across country, a baby in the hospital for a week, and my new book come out. Maybe I am just frazzled and it will get better on its own. Or maybe it won't.

There have been a series of articles of late that argue that there is an inherent conflict between motherhood and artistic work. There was Lauren Sandler's piece, "The Secret to Being Both a Successful Writer and a Mother: Have Just One Kid." The thesis of the piece is in the title, and I read it on my phone as I nursed my second baby, worried that I was doomed, that I had lost my voice to the sea witch, that I would never be a thinking, writing, intellectual being again but would become nothing more than an enlarged mammary gland needing to be periodically drained. Was she right? Was it impossible to balance the demands of an artistic career with the demands of multiple children?

Then there was Kim Brooks' "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Mom," on New York magazine's The Cut, in which she argues that there may be something fundamentally at odds between art and family, specifically that "the point of art is to unsettle, to question, to disturb what is comfortable and safe. And that shouldn't be anyone's goal as a parent." So much in this piece rang true for me that I started shaking as I read it. At one point, she asks one of her friends about her photography:

'I'm not doing it,' she said. 'I just can't. I can't get the space. Even when I have a few hours, it doesn't work. They're always with me, even when they're not.' I think she's going to say something like 'It won't be like this forever,' something stoic and accepting. But instead, she says in a voice that is pure anguish, 'There are moments when I feel like I'm dying a little more every day. I feel like a fish that's been caught and then abandoned on a dock, lying there, flopping and gasping, each gasp weaker than the last.'

I feel it too. I have tried to say it to my husband; I have tried to say, "I hate my life." I have tried to say, "I need help." I have tried to explain why I am finding being a mother so difficult, but in the face of his questions, my explanations collapse. It isn't exactly that spending time with the children is so horrible. I mean, sometimes it is, sometimes we have a bad day, but most of the time it is relatively pleasant: we go to the store, we go to the park, everyone is well behaved, the three-year-old says something cute, the baby does something new. The problem is not in what I am doing. The problem is in what I am not doing, which is writing every day, but which is also leading a life of the mind.

For me, the conflict between motherhood and my life as a writer is not so much Brooks' fear that art's job is to unsettle, while a mother's job is to make safe. I unsettle and disturb my children all the time. I remain unconcerned that my safe, middle-class life as a stay at home mom makes me less edgy or interesting. I view my own interestingness as being directly related to the thoughts I think and the work I do rather than the aesthetics of my leisure time. After all, Wallace Stevens was an executive at an insurance company. The idea that parenting is any more boring than working at an insurance agency is absurd.

Still, there is a concern that the stank of uncool motherhood will befoul the beautifully tormented artist. It is, I think, this same stank that women's magazines would like to occasionally excise from my work. In the novel Dept. of Speculation, which seems to be an epicenter for these sorts of worries in the Geist, Jenny Offill's protagonist and narrator writes: "My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabokov didn't even fold his own umbrella. Vera licked his stamps for him."

I have never worried that the mundane world would muddy my celestial paws; I've always been perfectly able to lick my stamps myself. In fact, I have been far, far too able. The older I get, the more I recognize the leveraging power of ineptitude. My husband can't cook well; I do the cooking. My husband accidentally shrinks a few sweaters; I do the laundry. My husband can't lactate; the baby comes to New York. In his inability to do things, he is excused from labor. In my rush to excel, to shine, to be a good wife and mother, I have done nothing but ensure my labor will be lengthy and unpaid.

For me, the problem then, is not in some platonic incompatibility between art and motherhood, a conflict between the mundane and the celestial, the safe and the unsettling. The conflict is between the selfishness of the artist and the selflessness of a mother.

My job when I am with my children is to have as few needs as possible so that I can meet theirs. It is my job to let my three-year-old dawdle on the potty of a Starbucks until he is sure he is done, even if I think I might shit my pants. It is my job to help him stop crying when he is overtired, even if I myself am so overtired I could cry. It is my job to be invisible to him.

There are other ways too in which I am invisible. I often feel that the work I do around the house is the work of an invisible person. How else could my husband consistently leave his underwear tucked behind the bathroom door? His wet towel on the bed? Surely, he does not imagine me, swearing, swooping to pick up his damp, crumpled briefs with a child on one hip as I listen to a podcast and ponder going gluten free. He is not making a statement with his actions, saying, "Here, wife, pick up after me." Instead, I think that on some level he believes that he lives in an enchanted castle where the broom comes to life and sweeps, and the teapot pours itself.

"Sometimes," I said to my mother the other day, "I feel they will devour me. I feel they will use me up like a tube of toothpaste and never even notice." She nodded, watching me cry in her living room, my baby crawling on her floor.

"They will," she said.

I read an interview with Jodi Picoult the other day, or as I will refer to her for this purpose, Jodi Fucking Picoult, wherein she described her writing life. The interview was old, from 2001, but keep in mind: Jodi Fucking Picoult had already written seven novels at that point. And here is her schedule: wake up at 5 in the morning, exercise, get kids to school, write for three hours, wrangle kids all afternoon, make dinner, put kids to bed, write after everyone goes to bed. "They are using her up like a tube of toothpaste!" I thought. I tried to imagine the family of a similarly successful male writer making him stay up to work after he has put the children to bed and I just couldn't. Not with seven novels under his belt. You can bet his wife would be whisper-screaming at the children to stay the hell away from daddy's office and go play in the yard. Your father, this imaginary wife would say, is Jodi FUCKING Picoult.

Which is not to say that Jodi Picoult hasn't chosen her role. She may very well want to spend all day with her children and stay up at night working. Aside from our cultural expectation that women should spread themselves thin in order to spend time with their children, there is also the bald fact that some women want to. God knows, even if we could afford a nanny or daycare, the idea of someone else taking care of the baby makes me uneasy. He's my baby. The three year old is my boy. If he told a nanny that he and the other boys saw a leprechaun spit on the slide, she wouldn't get to the bottom of it; she'd just let it go because who even knew what that weird little boy was saying now. It takes a mother to continue questioning all the way until you ascertain that the leprechaun spit is actually bird poop. You cannot pay someone to care about your kids the way you do. You cannot pay someone to be you.

Yet there are only so many hours in the day. If you are with your children, you are not writing. If you are writing, you are not with your children.

Several female writers, Zadie Smith and Jane Smiley among them, reacted with ire to Lauren Sandler's piece, "The Secret to Being Both a Successful Writer and a Mother: Have Just One Kid." Smith wrote that the real threat "to all women's freedom is the issue of time, which is the same problem whether you are a writer, factory worker or nurse...We need decent public daycare services, partners who do their share, affordable childcare and/or a supportive community of friends and family."

I find comfort in this insistence on the terrestrial nature of the problem and therefore the terrestrial nature of its solution. Time is the issue, not some metaphysical conflict between art and motherhood. But another part of me worries that being a writer isn't exactly like being a factory worker or a nurse. In Dept. of Speculation, Offill writes:

A student asked Donald Barthelme how he might become a better writer. Barthelme advised him to read through the whole history of philosophy from the pre-Socratics up through the modern-day thinkers. The student wondered how he could possibly do this. "You're probably wasting time on things like eating and sleeping," Barthelme said. "Cease that, and read all of philosophy and all of literature." Also art, he amended. Also politics. There are 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day, 7 days in a week, 52 weeks in a year, and X years in a life. Solve for X.

Offill's point is that greatness as an artist is not something you can achieve in a forty-hour work week, but something that must consume you entirely, even to the point of sublimating your own desire to survive as an animal, i.e. eat and sleep. Certainly, then, it would seem to follow that art is not something one can achieve in a spare two hours after the kids have been put to bed. And yet, some women have. Toni Morrison comes to mind as a rather blinding example, writing The Bluest Eye while raising two children on her own and teaching full-time at Howard University. Really, if one considers the hours, years and decades many celebrated male writers have spent doing little else than drinking, perhaps it is not necessary to give up eating or sleeping or even raising one's children after all. But is it fair to ask women to spin straw into gold over night as their children sleep? Or, more practically, is this even an attainable goal for most women?

My own mother wanted to be a writer, still wants to be one. She has not published a book yet. Occasionally people will tell me I am ambitious or productive or unusually driven, as though my accomplishments were my own. But I know that at every moment I am standing on her shoulders. I am, moreover, achingly aware of what this has cost her.

She raised me alone. When I first wanted to go to a boarding school, my grandmother chastened her-"It's cruel to let the girl look at those catalogs when you could never afford to send her." But send me she did, and paid for four years of college, and supported me again and again as I tried and failed and tried to have a career as a writer. I have lost count of how many times I have moved back into her house. I am living there now with my husband and children!

And she has not published a book. And I have published two. It is not because I am a better writer. It is because, when she solved for X, I came first. And if I came first, she came second.

It does not matter how brilliant a writer you are, your children cannot put you first. I could not put my mother first, nor can my boys put me first. Children are a hinge that only bends one way.

Male writers have often had children, but they have often famously refused to bend to them. On her twelfth birthday, Faulkner's daughter asked him not to get drunk, and he refused, telling her, "No one remembers Shakespeare's children."

Tolstoy's wife wrote in her journal:

How little kindness he shows his family! With us he is never anything but severe and indifferent. His biographers will tell how he helped the porter by drawing his own water, but no one will know that he never once thought to give his wife a moment's rest, or his sick child a drink of water. How in 32 years he never once sat for five minutes by his sick child's bedside to let me have a rest, or a good night's sleep, or go for a walk, or simply sit down for a while and recover from my labours.

When I shared these anecdotes with my husband, he responded with horror. "But these men were assholes," he said. "You can't possibly want to be like them? Even fathers nowadays couldn't get away with acting like that." "Of course not," I said, because it is hard to defend wanting to be an asshole. "But is it the price?" I asked, unwilling to give the discussion up. "Is the price of great art being an asshole?" He looked at me like I was insane. "No," he said. "The price of great art is not being an asshole!"

The next morning, I picked his underwear up from behind the bathroom door and wondered if he was right. I will say this: it is probably easier to be an artist and an asshole. It is probably easier to get the time you need to work if you don't care how it affects the people around you. It is easier to focus on achieving one thing than achieving two things.

As much as I want to be a good writer, I also want to be a good mother. I even want to be the one who cooks dinner. I may complain about being the only one who keeps track of the ornate minutiae of preschool (bring an egg carton by Friday! We need $10 for costumes for the play! Remember: Thursday is a half-day!), but I also don't want anyone else taking over this sometimes loathsome task. Life with small children takes place in the minutiae. Everything is in the now, and so if you are not part of the now, you miss it. As Offill writes, "A thought experiment courtesy of the Stoics. If you are tired of everything you possess, imagine that you have lost all these things."

The idea of not having my children, my husband, my life, is unbearable, and I find myself thinking of Dorothy Parker, alone and drinking herself to death with her poodle bitch at the Volney Hotel. Robert Gottlieb writes about her regrets at the end of her life in a profile for The New York Review of Books. He asks: "Yes, 'you might as well live,' but for what?"

He goes on:

If only she hadn't won celebrity so early and so easily. If only she had been blessed with Hemingway's talent, had written her novel (and it had been any good), hadn't succumbed to the easy life and money of Hollywood. If only she had married Mr. Right instead of lumbering herself with all those Mr. Wrongs. If she had had that baby...

The tragedy of Dorothy Parker, it seems to me, isn't that she succumbed to alcoholism or died essentially alone. It was that she was too intelligent to believe that she had made the most of herself.

It is rare to see it supposed that a female writer would have written more or better if she had had children, but that is exactly what Gottlieb suggests here: That to be an art monster on some level also requires that one become a monster, and perhaps the work of a lonely and sad monster is actually less robust than that of a psychologically healthy, happy, productive adult.

To make the most of oneself. In the end, this seems to me the only thing truly worth aiming for. And in that sense, I am able to concede that my husband is right: I do not wish to be like Faulkner or Tolstoy. I do not want to be an asshole. And who knows what further greatness those men could have achieved if they had allowed their hearts to be broadened and deepened by their children? Who knows what interesting fissures in their worldview the humility of housework would have caused?

Women's novels have long been criticized for focusing on the domestic, and in many ways the 19th century American hatred of Jane Austen has set the tone. Mark Twain wrote in a letter to a friend: "Everytime I read 'Pride and Prejudice' I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone." Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: "I am at a loss to understand why people hold Miss Austen's novels at so high a rate, which seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in their wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. ... All that interests in any character [is this]: has he (or she) the money to marry with? ... Suicide is more respectable."

Critic BC Southam summarized: "The novels are prized for their 'perfection'. Yet it is seen to be a narrow perfection, achieved within the bounds of domestic comedy." He explains that her work is "too pallid, too constrained, too refined, too downright unheroic."

I grew up with this fear: that the material that was near to me would be no good. I would have to live a life that would somehow bring me nearer to the topics "real" literature was about: war, violence, politics, travel and adventure. To this end, I moved to New York, traveled to India, and dated men who could tell me about the worlds I did not have access to, men who had been to prison, men who had been homeless, men who had been in mental institutions. I was troubled by my female protagonists who seemed to have so many emotions. They would have to go; they would have to change. I would have to change. In short, I was certain that what I really needed to do was write for men. I'm not sure anyone has written more combustibly about this recently than Claire Vaye Watkins in her essay "On Pandering: How To Write Like A Man." She writes of her short story collection Battleborn:

I wrote Battleborn for white men, toward them. If you hold the book to a certain light, you'll see it as an exercise in self-hazing, a product of working-class madness, the female strain. So, natural then that Battleborn was well-received by the white male lit establishment: it was written for them. The whole book's a pander. Look, I said with my stories: I can write old men, I can write sex, I can write abortion. I can write hard, unflinching, unsentimental. I can write an old man getting a boner!

But when Watkins has a baby, her working life is thrown off-kilter:

[W]hile my life was suddenly more intense, more frightening, more beautiful, more difficult, and more profound than it had ever been, I found myself with nothing to write about.
"Nothing's happening to me," I bemoan to Annie. "I need to go shoot an elephant."

Annie replies, in her late-night Lebowskian cadence, "Dude, you're a mother. You've had a child. You're struggling to make your marriage work, man. You are trying, against your nature and circumstance, to be decent. That's your elephant!"

Indeed, to relocate the heart of existence in the home and in motherhood is an inherently subversive artistic act. If Kim Brooks worries that the job of art is to unsettle and the job of a mother is to soothe, perhaps there is no more unsettling solution than to insist she can do both, that there is, in fact, no conflict there, that motherhood itself is dark and uncharted and frightening. What if, in fact, motherhood is a boon to the artist? What if writing motherhood is the frontier, is the uncharted territory into which we must step if literature is to advance? Brooks quotes Rivka Galchen: "Literature has more dogs than babies, and also more abortions," as though this is proof that babies were inimical to literature. But really, I think the truth may be that Tolstoy was just a shitty father and so he left some important stuff out.

Indeed, it is the hallmark of systemic sexism to believe that fatherhood should be left out, that the world of children and families is not of interest to literature. It is easy to dismiss the inherent interest of raising children because such a profoundly meaningful period in life comes to us cloaked in so many boring and pedestrian details: breast pumps and counting wet diapers, homework and vaccination schedules. But any soldier will tell you that much of the Army is similarly boring and routine. Yet we do not ask a war poet, Do you ever worry your work will become clouded with bureaucratic detail? We assume that he can reach past the quotidian to the elemental, and we should demand the same of mothers.

Jane Smiley, one of the most prolific and brilliant novelists working in America today, who has had three children, two step children, and four husbands, told Nicole Rudick at The Paris Review:

But having the kids as a distraction, having to do my time and then go pick the kids up at school or go to the grocery store or whatever-that was always good because something might happen out on the street that would be an idea. One of the ones that sticks in my mind was when I went to the daycare and saw all the four-year-olds crossing the street in front of the church in two lines. My inner mom says, Oh my God, what if a car comes screaming down the street right over the kids? And my inner author says, Wow, that's an idea. So my inner author was always sucking dry the inner mom or the inner girlfriend or the inner life or the inner horse owner and trying to make something of whatever that thought might be.

Here, Smiley locates the source of art in the world, insisting that it is a benefit to the artist to spend time puttering about in the quotidian world, in sharp contrast to Barthelme suggesting that the artist must absent himself from the world in order to more fully immerse himself in the realm of ideas. It is hard not to take Smiley at her word; after all, her advice is so much more palatable and practicable. And it seems the proof is in the quality of her work.

To make the most of oneself is not to forsake one's identity as a woman or as a mother. It is not to become an art monster if the monster in question is nothing but a drunk asshole. But it is also not to bend entirely, to flap hinge open to your children and your husband and the underwear that may be nestled behind a door, and give up the terrible, wonderful, furtive dream that is the self. To come second entirely, to be only mother, maid, cook, wife, is also not to make the most of oneself. One must learn how and when not to bend.

It is this, the balance between selflessness and selfishness, that is so difficult, but also, I would like to believe, worthwhile.

These days, as I try to walk that sacred line, Jane Smiley has become something of a patron saint. I think of her words about her own mother, in her interview with Rudick: "That's how I grew up. We did what we wanted to do. My mom was the example-she did what she wanted to do, she told you to do what you wanted to do."

Instructions worded in the positive instead of the negative are often so much easier to follow. As lost as I felt when instructed by the well-meaning slurry of web-articles about "trying to have it all," to somehow not "lose myself" to motherhood, as though my self were a tangible thing it was possible to misplace, the word "want" flips the problem on its head, and suddenly things seem much clearer to me.

"You should do what you want," Jane Smiley's mother says from the spot she now inhabits on a '70s couch in my brain.

"What?"

"Yeah," she says, "You should generally do exactly what you want."

I can feel it, as I wander through my days, as I change diapers and pour sippy cups of milk: the magical lodestone that is want. There is no surer way to locate your self, if you have misplaced her for a moment, than to ask yourself what you want.

And there is nothing more subversive for a woman to do than believe she deserves to get what she wants and to recognize in herself the willingness to fight to get it.

Works Cited
Offill, Jenny (2014-01-28). Dept. of Speculation (p. 8, 65, 90-91). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Porter, Cathy (2010-09-07). The Diaries of Sofia Tolstoy (Kindle Locations 3249-3252). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
This story was funded by our members. Please help us support women writers by becoming a member today! Your donation makes sure women writers get the attention they deserve. We're a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and all donations are tax-deductible.

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Recently, I was in New York City to do some publicity, and I was staying in a Holiday Inn in the Gowanus Canal of Brooklyn where the elevator shook and moaned every time we went to our tenth floor room as though the shaft were too small and the elevator was just barely squeezing through.

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The Atlantic magazine has just bafflingly proclaimed the arts " A Field Where Working Moms Aren't Punished " just a few months after New York Magazine published Kim Brooks' essay with the provocative tagline " Is Parenthood the Enemy of Creative Work? " (a subtitle that was recently amended). While many of us would be hard pressed to describe the arts as a supportive field from which to combine family and career, we also resist the long-held belief that the two are incompatible. Parenthood can be profound and generative. It can also, let's be honest, be incredibly complicated to pursue a creative career while raising a family. It is also difficult to maintain an artistic practice while coping with a serious health concern, caring for an aging parent, dealing with political oppression, or any of the other situations that intersect our lives as human beings who make art. Yet some of the most powerful art ever made has come from those living in the thick of challenging experiences.

Unlike other professions, art making often happens in the (unpaid) time between other responsibilities, which means it's the first thing to be pushed aside when any semblance of free time disappears. But here's where being creative comes in. Eventually, when we're ready, we invent new systems of production, we adapt creative practices to work in short bursts instead of long hours, we call on friends and family for help. We think and read and plan for a time when we'll have more time.

So the making, it will happen. But what to do when we find ourselves excluded from artist residencies or dropped by galleries at the mention of small children? Or more subtly, when we find vast numbers of cultural events inaccessible once we've created another person, or come to take care of one? Why should this isolate us so profoundly from our artistic communities?

One response to structural and social problems is to work collectively. This has led to a growing number of projects including Enemies of Good Art (UK), Mothership Project (IR), m)other voices (NL), Home Affairs (USA), Invisible Spaces of Parenthood (UK), and Cultural ReProducers (USA), a creative platform I have run since 2012. These groups create an important solidarity and a critical mass, but reaching out can be daunting when you're juggling personal and professional responsibilities on a whole new level.

GOING PUBLIC AS A PARENT
Creating systems of support can also happen one artist at a time. There's plenty we can do as individuals that adds up to better conditions for all artists. On the surface there might seem to be few models for art world success for anyone raising a child. The autonomous (male) genius working late into the night is a pervasive ideal, even as diverse collaborative and social practices flourish. Women have often kept their personal lives undercover to be taken seriously as artists, so while many have also been mothers , you'd never know without some digging. In an increasingly professionalized art scene it might still seem inappropriate to bring up family if it's not the focus of your work, but owning our roles as artists raising children can shift assumptions and create space for parenthood as one of many possible options. Many of these ideas focus specifically on mothers or parents in general, but it should go without saying here that similar tactics can be applied to include the voices of other groups as well.

* Mention parenthood during an artist talk. A few brief words on the challenges of reconfiguring studio time or seeing things from a new perspective can have a profound impact, making parenthood seem possible, realistic, and visible. While it is typically less damaging to the reputations of male-identified artists, it's still rare to hear a father discuss his role as caregiver. Parental roles are changing, and these conversations matter.

* Acknowledge the impact of raising a child when applying for residencies and funding where it's relevant. When they're writing proposals, the performative duo Spectralina (Selina Trepp and Dan Bitney) put it this way:
We are committed to being creative and engaged with the world while making sure that this includes our daughter. Having her in our life influences our outlook and thus also our creative output. Our art is inspired by our reality, as most art is. We see her inclusion in our creative life as a cultural and political position. It is important that what is represented in the culture industry isn't limited to the experience of single people; or to people who can afford and want a nanny; or to men who have wives who take care of their kids in the background. Art should be at the forefront of social change, and in that capacity it should offer models which allow for artist families to be visible and supported.
* Depending on timing and temperament, bring the kids to art events usually populated exclusively by adults. This can be far more stressful than staying home or digging into the budget for a sitter, but under the right circumstances it can benefit everyone involved. If you have a friend with kids (or a friend who likes kids), see if you can take turns to share the experience with family but still connect with other adults.

* Know your foremothers, and reference them. Sonia Delaunay's formative work of pure abstraction was a baby quilt made for her newborn son in 1911. Lea Lublin moved a crib into the Musée d'Art Moderne de la ville de Paris to perform 'mon Fils' in 1968, caring for her seven-month-old son in public for the run of the exhibition. Housebound with a newborn, Candida Alvarez painted on linen napkins, a practice that still informs her vibrant work. Stories like these have been buried by years of taboo and gendered hierarchy. In her recent book , Lise Haller Baggesen calls for a repositioning of motherhood as a place of experience and indeed expertise, a valid point from which to speak:
What I am asking for here, I guess, is for mothers to occupy spaces and conversations within art and academia, to claim a voice, many voices, to speak within and against the canon, to reflect on the complexities of mothering and motherhood within that context.
* Reschedule. Timing is a practical barrier that can be hard to understand without the experience of early parenthood. The events through which an artist builds connections to their creative community - opening receptions, lectures, performances - almost always take place in the evening, in the midst of some precarious dinner-bedtime ritual. Last year I noticed several shows at prominent galleries in my city had openings scheduled for 2pm on a Saturday instead of the usual Friday night thing. Had the stars aligned? If so it was just because the exhibiting artists asked for a time that worked better for them. For at least one, it was so that his partner and two young children could join him for the event.

* Reconfigure. Beyond scheduling, there are other ways to make art spaces accessible to participants of all ages. The Ottawa Art Gallery recently announced it will pilot free childcare at art openings this year. Plug Projects in Kansas City, MO, sets aside a quiet, informal space in back with markers and coloring books so that parents can nurse or chat while their overstimulated kids take a break from the crowded intensity of the opening. This is also the room where the cold drinks are kept, so everyone passes through at least once. It's a simple fix that can lower everyone's blood pressure and allow people with different needs to participate.

* Ask what you'll be paid. The question of how to financially sustain our creative lives is an issue that affects all artists. When an artist is invited to do a visiting artist lecture or develop a new project, they're not doing it for 'free' if they have to pay a childcare provider or negotiate with a family member. Setting guidelines for compensation not only helps to support one's own work, it helps set a precedent for treating other artists fairly. Be specific and ask if there's money to help cover childcare or production costs. By asking, we make that part of the equation visible.

Many of us also work with artist-run spaces that have no budget to speak of, run by creative people who are happy to support artists in other ways. While artist fees are sometimes just not possible, some spaces can offer professional photo or video documentation, while others might have part of an apartment to house your family out of town, or give access to specialized equipment. Being clear about what we need and how we can support each other allows us to build stronger creative community.

For sliding scale fee calculators and other great resources for artists and art spaces visit (Canada), (USA) , and Paying Artists (UK).

This essay has been published in partnership with Cultural ReProducers.

Christa Donner is a multimedia artist who investigates the human/animal body and its metaphors. She is the founder of Cultural ReProducers, a creative platform supporting cultural workers balancing career and family life.

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Who Cares for Whom? Parenthood in the Creative Community

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The Atlantic magazine has just bafflingly proclaimed the arts " A Field Where Working Moms Aren't Punished " just a few months after New York Magazine published Kim Brooks' essay with the provocative tagline " Is Parenthood the Enemy of Creative Work? " (a subtitle that was recently amended).

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Our frequent arts contributor and artist herself Grace Graupe-Pillard is making studio calls. This week she shares with us her visit to the studio of the artist Mimi Smith, whose work over the past fifty years has functioned as an archive of our struggle to survive and maintain our humanity.
Mimi Smith: 'A Knight in Shining Armor Theory of Life and Art'
Mimi Smith has spent a lifetime making art that integrates her personal life with the tumult and beauty of the surrounding world. Over the past fifty years, Smith has been making artwork as an archive of our struggle to survive and maintain our humanity, addressing the environment, nuclear war, AIDS, terrorism and feminism (before the word was commonly used) in compelling mixed media works, which she considers sculptures. For materials, she uses clothes, clocks, threads, among other everyday objects, which she mutates into powerful indictments of callous injustices that many people routinely face.

As a young artist in the mid-1960s, Smith said, "Girls/women knew how to look at clothes intrinsically as a visual object, as I had been taught to look at a work of art. I felt that if I made sculpture in the form of clothing, I could say something about the common experiences I shared with other girls/women."

Mimi Smith, Girdle, 58"x18"x8", rubber bath mats, elastic, ribbons, garters, hanger, 1966. Courtesy of the artist.

The 1966 diaphanous draped dressing gown/negligee Steel Wool Peignoir invites sexual seduction, but is lined with prickly steel wool, a warning to "keep your distance" and referencing a woman as housemaid and caretaker. Girdle, made out of rubber bath mats, is both whimsical and suffocating - a duality that Smith utilizes in most of her work where humor is always present, but laced with the biting realities of the acerbity of existence. The early clothes/sculptures, and the Knotted Thread series, where she spent hours in a hypnotic state of immersion, recreating elements in her house - stairs, dresser drawers, bed, television, chair, kitchen stove, windows, doors, wall phone and even a fireplace - all done with tape measures and a process of knotting thread, reminds me of modern day "genre paintings" where everyday life magically re-emerges into three-dimensional objects of grandeur.

Smith sees the world as a dangerous place and told me that a lot of her art focuses on " . . . feeling protected and being protective . . . a female 'Knight in Shining Armor' theory of life and art." Safeguarding women and children is a recurring theme. Having spent summers in upstate New York, she noticed that neighbors placed their flowers in protective surroundings to keep animals from destroying them. This vision became the conceptual impetus behind FLOWER, 2010, - a little girl's pink camouflage dress hanging inside a wire cylindrical container, both a secure structure and a cage suppressing freedom of movement and exploration.

Mimi Smith, Coverings for an Environmental Catastrophe: Chaps, 38"x26"x3", steel wool, aluminum screening, hooks, 1992. Courtesy of the artist.

A 1990s series titled Coverings for an Environmental Catastrophe: Chaps and Chest Plate uses steel wool and aluminum screening to shield the body from harm. These pieces hang on the wall like disembodied figures, vigilant custodians of salvation. Smith has recently begun to re-visit the armor concept, but the sculptures will now appear stronger and more lustrous with her addition of household silverware to the steel wool.

Smith is one of the earliest women to make art about pregnancy and motherhood, embroidering deeply private thoughts onto diverse materials. Having experienced multiple pregnancies, some resulting in miscarriages, she asserted, ". . . I wanted to knit myself a baby . . . a whole lot easier than doing it the usual way . . . " During her second pregnancy, while sitting in the park with her infant son, she observed women knitting. Feeling a shared connection with them, Smith began the first of many "knit babies," usually 21 inches long, the length of her son at birth. While stitching her knit baby, Smith had a miscarriage, and decided to add a white undershirt to the sculpture, subtly embroidered with the shockingly poignant words "the baby is dead" - a work that is a eulogy to the potency and exquisite fragility of child-bearing.

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Our frequent arts contributor and artist herself Grace Graupe-Pillard is making studio calls. This week she shares with us her visit to the studio of the artist Mimi Smith, whose work over the past fifty years has functioned as an archive of our struggle to survive and maintain our humanity.

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Celine Marchbank is a documentary photographer whose latest work is very personal, and yet one that will resonate with many of us.

In 2009 Marchbank found out that her mother, Sue Miles, had cancer. Marchbank recalls that her mother was "amazingly optimistic" and reassuring about the outcome, but by by April the following year the cancer was confirmed as terminal.

"While I was trying to come to terms with the fact she was dying, I decided I wanted, or maybe needed, to document the time she had left," says Marchbank.

But there was always that question as to whether it was the right thing to do.

"I didn't want to create a graphic portrayal of her death - it would have been impossible and wrong to focus only on the dying part - but rather I wanted to photograph our last months together.

"I looked at the things that made her uniquely her, the details in her house I thought I knew so well, the things that would also be gone when she was."

This is a very personal thing. Others have documented such moments, each in their own way. For some the very idea of picking up a camera at such a time would seem taboo, for others a most natural response.

Marchbank feels that the few seconds spent taking pictures each day gave her a way to record the moments that would come to mean so much.

"Her love of flowers was a beautiful part of her personality; the house was always full of them, and as I photographed them I realised they were symbolic of what was happening - they represented happiness, love, kindness and generosity, but also isolation, decay, and finally death."

The work is called Tulip, after her mother's favourite flower, and it is these small, often overlooked parts of her mother's life that form the narrative of the work.

Marchbank found the editing process after her mother's death cathartic, and only now, five years on, is she ready to share the work with a wider audience through the publication of a book. Tulip has become about her own journey through grief.

"Grief is like a grey cloud above your head, sometimes just a nagging doubt at the back of your mind, other times a huge storm cloud filling your whole mind. As long as I feel this grey cloud then, in a way, I will always feel her presence."
Tulip by Celine Marchbank is published by Dewi Lewis.

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My mother's favourite flower: A life remembered - BBC News

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Celine Marchbank is a documentary photographer whose latest work is very personal, and yet one that will resonate with many of us. In 2009 Marchbank found out that her mother, Sue Miles, had cancer. Marchbank recalls that her mother was "amazingly optimistic" and reassuring about the outcome, but by by April the following year the cancer was confirmed as terminal.

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Contemporary Art Mamactivists

In winter of 2016 I sent a call out to a group of artists that we could loosely define as mamactivists. I asked these activist-mother-artists if they would be willing to respond to a set of questions for an edited section of this special issue of Studies in the Maternal, and asked them to please forward the request to any other artists they felt fit the call. The sampling is thus, to a certain degree, random. It has the specificity of having been generated, first and foremost, by my knowledge of artists working on and with the maternal, developed over the past six years of working as an artist, art historian, and curator on the topic. It has also been configured by the specificity of chance encounter, as word of mouth spread and one artist sent another my way.

The fourteen artists gathered here represent a wide range of geographic locations (from Israel to the Netherlands), cultural backgrounds (from Muslim to Mennonite), and material approaches (from Performance to Printmaking). I included every submission, as the aim of this special forum is not to curate for a particular argument but to offer a sampling of the artistic voices and approaches that are at work under the banner of 'contemporary mamactivism'. That said, there are two limiting factors that should be mentioned. First, a number of artists whose work I might identify as 'mamactivist' chose not to have their voices included on the basis of either the 'mama' or the 'activist' part of the neologism. For some of these artists, a dis-identification with the term 'mama' arose from important activist work to 'de-gender' the issue by focussing on parent artists, not mother artists, and arose in such a way that they preferred not to participate in this forum; for others it was the term 'activist' that didn't feel quite right. A second issue to note, and this is one that many of my colleagues working in this field will identify with, is that, for many working mama-artist-academic-activists, their moment of 'awakening' emerged alongside their new status as maternal bodies. This means that not only are we witnessing increasing attention to contemporary art and the maternal in general, as this journal, this special issue, and the conference upon which it is based attest to, but many of those writing, making, and organizing in the field are actively straddling parental labour with young children alongside artistic, academic, and other professional labour - often with inadequate support. In other words: it is great that so much is happening; we are nonetheless finite creatures. There are at least two other similar volumes in the works right now, and a number of voices that accepted the invitation to speak in these pages are also contributing to those other volumes, while some who were invited felt already over-committed enough, and politely declined to add a second or third publication deadline to the same work-cycle. I share this 'backstory' specifically in order to highlight the explosion of interest in this topic at this historical moment, while at the same time highlighting the labour that goes into even a seemingly simple contribution such as this one. I thank all of the artists here for their time, their patience, and their commitment to activist maternal discourse. I also thank all of those not represented here for the same. This is a feminist moment. We are in solidarity.

My inspiration for what follows came from a M/E/A/N/I/N/G #12 Forum On Motherhood, Art, and Apple Pie that I read, and was impacted by, early on in my feminist art education. Founded in 1986 by Susan Bee and Mira Schor, M/E/A/N/I/N/G was a New York-based journal dedicated to contemporary art criticism that regularly hosted topical forums with the aim of gathering testimonials and presenting them, largely unedited, for its readership to learn from. The questions asked in that 1992 M/E/A/N/I/N/G Forum were:

1. How has being a mother affected people's response or reaction to your artwork?

2. How has it affected your career?

3. Have you encountered discrimination from other artists, dealers, galleries, art schools, critics because of motherhood or pregnancy?

4. Did you postpone starting your career or stop working when your children were young?

5. How would you describe the differences in treatment of male artists with children or of women artists without children?

6. Did having children enhance your creativity or affect the direction of your work?

The responses Bee and Schor received were wide-ranging and included outrage at having been 'outed' as a mother in the New York art world of the 1990s - not surprising in an art world hostile to feminist, let alone maternal-feminist, bodies. Twenty-four years later, my questions reorient this inquiry from a general concern with the impact of motherhood on one's artistic production and reception toward the question of maternal activist art in particular:

1. When and why did you start making activist/political work on the maternal?

2. What reception/reaction did you receive for the work?

3. What is the latest activist/political work you have made on the maternal?

4. What shifts do you see from this first to this last?

5. Why is the maternal, in your opinion, important to activist, engaged, political art today?

This shift in focus is a direct result of the visibility and recognized importance of the maternal in feminist art today. The maternal is no longer (simply) a condition that informs or disrupts an artistic practice and its success within a normative or alternative art market; the maternal is an ethics, a practice, and a politics that is urgently needed today.

The responses that follow have only been lightly edited, in order to retain the individual writerly vocality of each artist.

* * *

Rachel Epp Buller (United States)

I started making activist/political work on the maternal around 2007. When my youngest child was two years old, I turned to making work around themes of maternal and familial identity and later moved toward ideas of how certain types of knowledge and traditions of making have been passed through generations of women. I did not at first view any of this as activist work but, at the same time in my art historical writing, I was seeking out artists, historical and contemporary, who had given voice to experiences of maternity and/or care work. For some reason, that art (apart from Mary Kelly's Post Partum Document) had been notably lacking from my graduate studies in feminist art history. So, in both my making and my writing of the past 10 years, I have felt strongly that making visible and drawing attention to maternal experiences is a political act in and of itself. Women, particularly older women, have been overwhelmingly positive about this work, perhaps because many of them see something of their own experiences reflected in it. What sometimes surprises me is how difficult it seems to be to bring critical attention to experiences that are quite widespread: often, art around the maternal (both by me and by others) seems to be pigeon-holed as a private production - in other words, if one is making work related to the family it must surely be only about one's own family and not about any larger cultural issues that should be taken seriously.

Rachel Epp Buller maintains a dual critical and creative practice as an art historian and printmaker / book artist. Much of her writing addresses intersections of art and the maternal, including her book, Reconciling Art and Mothering and a new in-progress project on Inappropriate Bodies (for Demeter Press). In her recent creative work, she investigates fictional narratives of imagined family histories and textural references to matrilineal traditions of fine handwork such as sewing, crochet, and delicate cut-paper work known as Scherenschnitte. She writes, curates, and lectures widely on the maternal body in contemporary art, and she privileges collaborative projects, both within the visual arts and across disciplines, as in her co-edited multidisciplinary volume of essays, Mothering Mennonite. Her most recent collaboration, with the directors of Das Verborgene Museum in Berlin, resulted in Alice Lex-Nerlinger, 1893-1975: Fotomonteurin und Malerin / Photomontage Artist and Painter, a dual-language book and the first-ever retrospective of the artist, on view April 14 - August 7, 2016 in Berlin. She is a board member of the National Women's Caucus for Art (US), a Fulbright Scholar, a regional coordinator of The Feminist Art Project, and current Associate Professor of Visual Arts and Design at Bethel College (US).

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Deirdre Donoghue (Netherlands)

My maternal journey began some years before my journey as an artist. When my son was two and a half years old, I made my first artworks that touched on the maternal. However, my focus back then was more on the colonisation of and the history of childhood.

A key moment for my current practice was when my son was 12 and my daughter two and a half. This is when I made the performance piece Kitchen Lecture: Notes on Gesture (2009) (Figure ). It was the first time in my career that I directly touched on the taboo of being an artist and a mother. Rather than separating the two different roles, I, for the first time in my career simply allowed them to collapse together in the work. Up to the making of this work, I had always felt the pressure to keep my mothering silent, invisible, secret even from 'professional' circles and the various discourses and knowledge production events within the arts. Kitchen Lecture: Notes on Gesture marked a cornerstone in my art practice and thinking about the relationship between the labor and politics of mothering and the labor and politics of making art. It was a kind of a birth into the political. Having worked as a mother, performer, writer, director and a visual artist within different northern European countries and contexts where knowledge production and interdisciplinarity are embraced as key values within artistic production, whilst at the same time the visibility of maternal labor is shunned to various degrees, Kitchen Lecture was an artistic attempt to make maternal life and labor visible and to include it in the interdisciplinary discourses within the arts. After making this work there was no turning back for me.

The Kitchen Lecture has been shown in a variety of ways, often adapting its form to the specific exhibition situation. There is the original version, which is a video performance, but I have also performed it live and without my daughter and family around. It has been adapted to a book format, screened in a museum and performed and screened over a dinner in an artist made botanical garden. Perhaps because of the extent that I have re-considered and adapted the format for each public moment, and the publics to whom it has been shown to, I have mainly had positive responses from both women and men, mothers and fathers.

I would also like to consider here my work with the international M/Other voices Foundation for Art, Research, Theory, Dialogue and Community Involvement, which I found in 2014 as a continuation to my year long artistic research project: The Maternal as an Attitude, Maternal Thinking and the Production of Time and Knowledge (Witte de With Centre for Contemporary Art, NL) (Figure ). The foundation functions as a porous platform belonging to mothers and others engaged in maternal work alongside their practices as scholars, artists, writers, curators, historians etc. interested in the maternal. One of the activities that I used the foundation for was producing The Mothernists, a conference and art exhibition in 2015. Another hugely important part of my political activism within 'the maternal' is my work as a doula, supporting and holding space for mothers-to-be in their journeys into motherhood (Figure ). Although I find my work as a doula highly important and inspiring as a woman and as a mother, it was theory, or rather the lack of it on the subject of birth that brought me to train and start working as a doula alongside my practice as an artist, mother and a researcher. I am currently also working as a PhD researcher at The Institute for Cultural Inquiry (University of Utrecht) on maternal subjectivities, aesthetics, ethics and affect. Time will tell how all these different elements will begin to dance and resonate together.

The Kitchen Lecture was an artistic work with political undertones. The m/other voices foundation is both a political and an activist gesture. My work as a doula is both political, and activist. In broad lines I would say that the main shift here has been a move from a self-contained aesthetic form towards an activist and political aesthetic practice through a political awakening brought on by my maternal experience and encounters. Although the maternal as a subject and as a field is not my sole focus within my art practice, it has contributed to a sharpening of both my artistic and civic voice and an exploration of form.

As artists work with signification, coding and representation, their work can be seen as a site of resonance where signs, relations and narratives become revealed, (de-)constructed and (re-)produced. I believe that looking towards the maternal in relation to artistic practices and processes can unearth alternative social and political possibilities and models of being in the world. Artists and other cultural producers are actively embedding their practices more and more within the socio-political tapestries of world events and not only in subject matter, but also in their formal choices and aesthetics. Yet, despite these tendencies towards relational aesthetics and social engagement, art world structures are still dominantly organised in ways, that support the endlessly mobile, individual subject; the solitary genius, the flâneur who '... is always in full possession of his individuality... .' When art production dominantly stems from such singular subjectivities, there remains a gap between those who get to produce new knowledge and the kinds of knowledge that gets to be (re-)produced.

As long as we value art as important and valuable for effecting social change, and as a field of new knowledge production, no one should be excluded from opportunities to develop their thinking and voice through an artistic practice because they are engaged in caring labour. It is important to include, nurture, develop and cultivate maternal voices and vocabularies within a global context of current socio-political conditions brought about by capitalist, neoliberal free-market economy and its causal effects on ecologies of knowledge and care.

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Davina Drummond & Yara El-Sherbini (United Kingdom)

We are currently developing the activist strand: a makeshift Parent Artist Union, made up of artists, for artists, as a way to tackle the issue from within. The Union is devising a list of demands of how institutions can better support parent artists, and provide training and assessments for institutions to see how artist-parent-friendly they are. All three strands of this ongoing project demand direct participation with others. The Facebook group titled Motherhood: A Social Practice does not exist without group members, the lesson without students and the union without union members. We have experienced a high level of interest and genuine need for the project; our Facebook group grows everyday, we are planning lessons in new cities and people from across the globe are expressing interest in joining our union.

The Maternal is important to us because we believe it's such a significant, essential and powerful life experience. There are a lot of issues around the Maternal that expose the gender disparity in the wider world, and noticeably in the art world, where one would imagine it would be more liberal and egalitarian. Artists are the most underpaid/unpaid workers in the arts economy. Combine this with becoming a mother, which is likewise unpaid and undervalued, and you struggle to afford the time to make art/work. It's partly a consequence of there being no formal structure in place for when artists become parents, hence why we have such urgency about creating a union and putting those structures in place.

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Farheen Haq (Canada)

My most recent work is explicitly about the psychological and physical spaces that mothers embody in their caregiving work. I have been thinking and living this work throughout my children's early years but it wasn't until 2015 when they were both in school that I had the time/space/mind to reflect on the decade of mothering I had been engaged in. My visual art career began very politically and was about reclaiming representation and taking space as a Muslim woman. I'm interested in rendering visible the unseen - so now I am translating the invisible experience of mothers into my work.

The shift for me has been in understanding myself in relationship. I have begun to unravel the threads of my own traumas as a woman/girl/Muslim/Canadian by examining my family history, my memory, but now I am keenly aware that my personal experience is not enough - all this has happened in the context of place. The land is where all my stories take place and I can only best understand myself once I consider the stories that were here before me - I am speaking about indigenous histories that have traditionally been rendered invisible. By acknowledging the intersections of my history and present life with the history of the place I inhabit and the people of that land I understand my own experience in a deeper way. My practice is shifting into a place of conversation, collaboration and community.

The maternal is the source of all our creative work - it all begins with a mother, it is also the great equalizer. For too long we have left our personal lives at home and done our social/political work out in the world, but the home is our world, what happens there affects everything. How we are raised, mothered, bonded, not bonded, the invisible work of caregiving, these are the building-blocks of our societies - it just doesn't make sense to not examine the maternal - it pervades all.

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Jodie Hawkes (United Kingdom)

I think I had been trying to make a performance about my experience as a parent since the birth of my first child in 2009, but I felt like nobody would be interested. Becoming a parent forced me to engage in aspects of neoliberal capitalism - and the status quo that it creates - in ways that before having children I could easily avoid. I found the overt gendering of children to be really frustrating - specifically the 'princess ing ' of my daughter by mainstream culture. But really, I think my work focuses more on the kinds of unfairness that are inherent within neoliberalism, and how, now as a parent I felt angered by a culture that doesn't see neoliberalism and market driven capitalism as an ideology - but as an accepted norm.

But, still I didn't really have an outlet for this frustration - until my second pregnancy, which coincided with the first pregnancy of Prince William and Kate Middleton. It was the NATIONAL-BABY-FEVER that surrounded the birth of the 'Royal Baby' that provided a really useful comparison for me, preparing for and thinking about my own baby, soon to be born. My son was born before the Royal Baby - Prince George - and when I started to think, as all parents must do, about the life my son could expect, in relation to the overwhelming privilege of the Royal Baby, I had a useful frame for my first performance project about the maternal. The work, My Son & Heir was really well received (Figure ). It's been performed at venues and festivals throughout the UK and also as part of a conference about Maternal Performance. You can always tell the audience members who have children. And those who don't tend to reflect on their own childhoods and their relationship with their parents. But of course the political context of the project crosses that boundary. We have had a number of great reviews and will be showing the work again next month as part of a programme of work looking at alternative approaches to the family in London.

We're also part of a group of artist/families called FAN (Family Activist Network). We spent a year writing letters to each other about our relationship as families to climate change. Last December, five of the families (including ours) travelled to Paris to join the Red Lines protest during COP21 - no small feat in relation to the ethical questions about taking our children on such a trip so soon after the Paris terrorist attacks...less than a month. We're meeting up with the same families this weekend to start thinking about a performance response to our trip, a way of disseminating our experience more wildly. We spoke about the Paris trip in a presentation last weekend as part of a festival in Bristol called Mayfest, at an artist-led event looking at how artists can still survive in the current climate.

The first piece My Son & Heir fits quite clearly within my existing artistic practice - I've been making live art duo performances for the last 10 years with my partner. The FAN project is a real departure in that we're working with a number of other artists and their children. FAN, also has a more overt activist agenda, asking how we can be families and activists - in relation to our shared concerns about the family and climate change. I think it's always important for women (regardless of motherhood) to have a voice, to be heard. And, I think the idea of the family (which is how I describe my work in this area, as it is always a collaboration with my partner and children) makes people perform in ways that are complicit with consumer capitalism - something that frustrates me. It's important for me to make art/performance that challenges these assumptions about the family and make the family perform in more political contexts, rather than just as consumers (Figures , ). We are so often sold a certain (neoliberal capitalist) version of good-mothering. Bringing attention to this, my practice opens up new ways to think and feel about the maternal as an important mode of contemporary activism.

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Sarah Irvin (United States)

I first began activist work focusing on the maternal by calling for a change within myself. I had never envisioned myself as a mother, and I found no model for motherhood that I wanted to embody. I firmly believed that I could not reconcile my studio practice with the circumstances of having children. I began to ask myself what aspects of these circumstances were truly fixed and which were malleable.

I decided to adopt, as an axiom, the idea that the opposite was true; that there was work I could only make in the context of pregnancy and caring for a child. I immediately envisioned not only work I could create because of these circumstances, but myself in these circumstances for the first time. In that moment, new possible futures were enabled. Me as 'mother making artwork' had never made sense, but me as 'mother because of my work' did.

By considering actions of care as not only the subject of my work, but in fact the very thing that enabled my work, I was able to shift my viewpoint. I had devalued the experience of caretaking, and had assumed that my caretaking role would not exist as an equal partnership with my husband. By challenging my assumptions, I acknowledged the value of caretaking and its right to be in the discourse of visual art. In spite of this, I could still identify the very real presence of the framework that previously caused me to reject the notion of motherhood. My mindset had been founded in assumptions of gender-based inequality and a social construct of motherhood that creates disadvantages for both women and men.

My artistic practice became a stage. On this stage my husband and I adopted the roles of 'father' and 'mother.' The work was every day. With the goal of equity in our caretaking roles, we each continually sought to liberate the other from any disparity. Our activism was small, room-sized, and one-on-one. He had zero days of paternity leave. I was in grad school. Our closest family members lived an 8-hour drive away. I wanted to breastfeed. Biology, economics, and culture all had their say in how we would care for our daughter. We responded with our own framework for parenting. In many areas the only option was to conform. In many instances, equality was not an option.

The boundaries between the domestic space and the public realm revealed themselves as porous and ever-shifting. I put the evidence on view. I displayed work that visualized the discipline of caretaking through our lived experience, wondering where we had control and where we did not. I carefully considered the impact of my presence and my work. I found it very important to have a thinking, working, obviously maternal body occupying public discourse.

By expressing the viewpoint of the maternal experience at the intersection of the social construct of motherhood with the lived experience of bearing and caring for a child, visual art can give insight into forces of inequality that have a global impact. There are tiny cracks in the walls that are built by inequality. My activism is small and subtle, but my hope is that it can infiltrate these walls in ways that other, bigger activism cannot.

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Courtney Kessel (United States)

My work addresses the 'stuff' of maternity as subject matter.

The 'stuff' refers to the things lying around the house and that occupy one's mind that wouldn't otherwise be there if you didn't have a child.

As I look back through my works, one piece stands out as being the earliest maternal and that is Il Nido 2006. I made a huge 8' in diameter nest out of saplings, fabric and other things lying around my house. This was for the Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition Annual Outdoor Sculpture exhibition. At the time, I was no longer living in Brooklyn, but in Kentucky where I sourced the saplings. During the opening events, I invited participants to sit, lie, or hang out in the nest. My daughter Chloé was still breastfeeding when we delivered the sculpture to Dumbo. We had a really long day and she had not napped yet. At one point, I breastfed Chloé in the nest and she fell asleep. I laid her down and covered her up. There was quite a buzz about where the mother was and whether the 'baby' was part of the piece or not!!! That piece, in hindsight, was maternal, but formally, In Balance With (2009 - present) was the first piece in which I directly addressed the maternal (Figures , ).

I was starting grad school as a single mother going through a slightly traumatic divorce at thirty-five. I was literally trying to balance my life. I asked myself why career and family couldn't merge? They did in reality, so why not in the gallery, too? Throughout those grad school years, my practice incorporated more and more of the domestic, and the domestic became more a part of the gallery. The performance piece (now an annual event) In Balance With incorporates a number of items from home, culled and curated from the things that my daughter and I are currently working on or interested in. These items (books, toys, stuffed animals, food, laundry, bicycle, roller skates, soccer ball and shoes or any combination of these) are placed on her side of the seesaw. Each time something new is strapped on to the seesaw, I 'test' the balance. Once there is balance, I have to labor to maintain the balance until Chloé is ready to be finished. This represents the very literal fact that I cannot make my artwork unless she is content and occupied.

Thankfully, the work has been received really well. I think many different people in many walks of life, can relate. I've had mothers, fathers, grandfathers, come up to me after the performance, crying, telling me how beautiful and true the piece felt to their own experience.

I know there may be a day soon that my daughter no longer wants to participate in the performance and I'm okay with that. The piece is about my subjective negotiation of maternal labour. Through my experience, creative practice and continued research of maternity, I am interested in exploring ways in which we can address other issues through the maternal lens of ethical care for an 'other'.

My most current piece on the maternal is a series called Without Chloé (Figure ). This is a photographic project in which I have taken portraits of my home and literally cut out anything that is of Chloé, about Chloé, or by Chloé. These photographs are fairly sculptural as they are framed in a shadow box that is hung about two inches from the wall. The shapes that are cut out project onto the wall on which the work is hung incorporating the exhibition space into the pieces, through shadow.

Apart from these works, I want to point to one in particular: Maternal Verbs (After Richard Serra), 2012. This piece is a direct reference to Richard Serra's . As a sculptor, I love this list of verbs that dictate how one would act upon a material. However, I see it as fairly masculinist, forcing one's action upon a material. Instead, I looked to my experience as a mother to collect verbs that happen 'within' a relationship, specifically that of a mother and daughter. As I was preparing this project for a two-person show at ROYGBIV in Columbus, Ohio, I told my mom about it and she proceeded to add almost 2/3 of the verbs!!! This made sense, as she has been a mother for two-thirds longer than myself. I mimicked the exact look of Serra's piece and put it in a frame. I still use the verbs in a variety of other projects because they speak to the maternal in myriad ways. I am particularly interested in putting the 'mother' in the gallery. I think that is crucial to moving forward in Feminism. I think of it as a protest of sorts for the women of the second generation who were fighting for equality in the gallery. They had 'choice' between family and career, but, too often, could not claim their maternity as valid subject matter or as a specific subjective position from which to speak as an artist (there are notable exceptions to this, of course, but still...). My agenda is getting the maternal in the political space of the gallery to enlighten this positionality and claim its validity for myself and all self-identified mothers.

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Helen Knowles (United Kingdom)

The first artwork I ever made about the maternal was a collaborative work which included running workshops with three generations of women and men to explore their perceptions of childbirth. The resulting work was three artist books. The three groups that I worked with were elderly men and women in respite care at Cherry Tree Hospital, children at St Anne's Primary school and teenage mothers at Salford Women's Centre. Together through mono-printing and storytelling we created responses to their experiences and perceptions of birth (Figure ).

Some of the workshops were particularly shocking in that the experiences the women shared (especially those who had their children in hospitals between the 1920's and 1950's) were brutal. With the children, it was evident that they were completely non-plussed and frank about where babies came from. Some having even witnessed their mothers' Caesareans, others depicting fathers fainting and much blood and gore. There was also a lot of humour - a drawing of a mobile phone giving birth to another mobile phone and idealised images of mother and child. During the workshops with teenage mothers what became starkly obvious was the gap in language between the medical terminology and their own vernacular descriptions of the body. Vagina = flue (a Salfordian word for a chimney flue which can be seen in the industrial landscape all around the area) but familiarity with words like areola or even cervix were limited.

This work came from my own experiences of birth, having had an emergency Cesarean and then a home birth. I became interested in the politics and practice of birth and subsequently went on to explore this through curating an exhibition called Birth Rites which toured the Glasgow Science Centre and the Manchester Museum in 2008. I oversaw five collaborations between midwives, birth practitioners and obstetricians - all of which can be seen on the website Birth Rites - Exploring the politics and practices of child birth. I was trying to make sense of my own experiences through art. Several artist books and also wallpapers pieces, Birth and Conception, were created during this period. I was motivated to communicate to other women that it was important to consider birth, whether you have been through it or are still young and far away from the idea of pregnancy. I felt that our society had made imagery of this life process taboo and that in order for women to be empowered in the decision-making about their own births there needed to be an open discussion about the subject. It seemed obvious to me that artwork was the best way of opening up the discussion since it has an uncanny way of reaching people on a deep, subjective and visceral level.

My initial works were well received because I had purposefully played with decorative material, as well as using drawing and printing as a medium (which seems less confrontational than photography). I also felt that, to challenge people's perceptions, it was important to get round them with humour and beauty. However, on curating the exhibition at the Glasgow Science Centre and working with Hermione Wiltshire (a long time collaborator) who had appropriated an image from the famous radical midwife and activist, Ina May Gaskin (a photograph of a woman in ecstatic labour which she wanted to site in the entranceway to the exhibition), my views began to change. The GSC were adamant that they did not wish to exhibit this work in the entranceway and their reasoning was that it was inappropriate for children and generally shocking. In the words of one member of staff 'I would not show my niece that'. When asked what was deemed appropriate, I was told that they were happy to exhibit the drawings of a woman undergoing a forceps delivery. In essence, a woman having an ecstatic labour who appeared empowered in the process of birth was censored in favour of a fairly traumatic looking drawing of an assisted delivery. The Manchester Museum was different in their approach stating that they were happy to show the work even though it was next to the children's play area and they would wait for responses and deal with them if and when they happened.

There were no complaints.

Terese Crowning in Ecstatic Labour was then one of the founding works in the Birth Rites Collection which I set up in 2009 and curated at Salford University (Figure ). It is a collection of contemporary art on the subject of birth. Initially, the university administration had problems with the work, wanting to censor it and keep it in a locked room until the midwives themselves took into their own hands and put it out on the corridor. These experiences taught me that it is institutions that seem to have the most problems with challenging work, constantly seeking to protect their public from what they believe may offend. Generally this hypothetical protectionism is founded on patriarchal views of women and the body.

In 2011/2012 I received an Arts Council England grant to make my most recent and probably last work on the maternal called Youtube Portraits. This work was the culmination of all my experiences, subjective and personal, and those which I gained through the years curating artwork and making work on childbirth. Youtube Portraits is a set of seven large-scale screen-prints, each one a portrait of a woman in the act of childbirth (Figure ). The portraits are stills taken from video footage found by the artist on Youtube, part of a vast library of homebirth films posted online by the women whose birth experiences are recorded. The works featured in Youtube Portraits appropriate and re-present these women's filmed experiences and connect to a wider international concern with social media as a tool to democratise what can often be tightly controlled and censored experiences. Each print is created by exposing the screen with a digital projector, bestowing a pixelated quality to the image which directly references the digital origin of the source material. The virtual Youtube footage is now transferred into a physical object through the medium of print.

I guess the most obvious shift in my work has been to depict birth graphically through print and photography. My second artist book called Ecstatic Birth Pamphlet, seen on my website, was a precursor in some ways to the Youtube Series since it appropriated images found on the net and pixellated them through the screen print process. Having recently read Hito Steryl, The Wretched of the Screen, I can see a concurrent strain of thought with regards to low-res images and high-res images and my need to take images which have a low-res quality and recreate them as crafted prints.

I guess the maternal is the most un-talked-about, the most undiscussed, and untrendy part of feminist thinking. Depicting the body became frowned upon during early feminism because some thought it played into the male gaze. However, I think it's useful not to try to win an argument by negating, or ignoring something. Our society (which views most things as spectacle) loses out in the form of embodied knowledge (for instance attending another woman's birth to know how birth is) but we have gained the possibility to see other births through video sharing. Obviously this will have some kind of effect which we are not yet sure of. However, the possibility to challenge the medical system, or any normative system through sharing knowledge in this way, is empowering. There is so much heavy abjection around being a woman and this was perpetuated through much of the feminist writing of the 80's. As Fannie Sosa rightly states:

I create round spaces to exchange knowledge, gather strength and nurture people.... I resist the powers that want to break our circles, our sisterhood and our collective motherhood and authority. I author myself, and that is an act of resistance.
Helen Knowles is an artist and curator of Birth Rites Collection and mother of two boys. She studied at Glasgow School of Art and is currently studying at Goldsmiths University on the MFA. She lives and works in Manchester and London. The performance of The Trial of Superdebthunterbot premiered at Southwark Crown Court, London (2016). Recent exhibitions include; 'Between the Lines', GRAD, London (2016), Goldsmiths Gallery, (2016) 'Pro-create' Goldsmiths / Museum of Motherhood, (2015), COLLABORATE! Oriel Sycharth Galley Wrexham, (2015), The Withdrawing Room, Folkstone, (2014), Mokuhanga, To-kyo (2014), 'Private View : Public Birth', GV Art, London (2013), Women's Art Library, London (2013); Life is Beautiful', Galerie Deadfly, Berlin (2012); Digital Romantics, Dean Clough Gallery (2012) and Walls are Talking, Whitworth Art Gallery (2010). She carried out a residency in Moscow/Vishny Volochok with the Moscow Institute of Contemporary Art (2015) and Santa Fe Arts Institute, (2013). She is a recipient of awards from Arts Council England, Awards for All, Goldsmiths Innovation Fund, amongst others. Her work is held in public and private collections including, The Joan Flasch Artist Book Collection, Winchester Special Collections, The National Art Library, RCA and GSA Special Collections, The Whitworth Art Gallery, Tate Library and Archive, Museum of Motherhood, NY and Birth Rites Collection.

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Irene Lusztig (USA)

I don't think I understood my work on the maternal as activist/political work at first, so maybe there are two separate moments that I need to talk about to answer this question. I started making work on the maternal during my pregnancy in 2006. At first I didn't know I was 'making work' per se, but I was urgently trying to think through questions around pregnancy and childbirth that felt fraught and complex to me, and was having a hard time finding models for complex, critical, historically-grounded maternal thinking that would help me think through the things I was experiencing. There seemed to be a weird absence or evisceration of critical language and thinking - combined with an unwillingness to give voice to the kinds of ambivalent feelings I was having around the experience of pregnancy - in all the 'what to expect' style books I encountered in the mothering section of the bookstore or in my prenatal education class (where the word 'pain' was systematically erased and replaced with culturally-neutral words like 'intensity' and 'wave'). Even the conceptual framework of 'what to expect' seemed suspect and unhelpful to me as a starting point for a productive discussion of an experience that seemed to be all about the impossible or inadequate nature of our narratives of expectation. So during my pregnancy I started doing archival research for what eventually became my 2013 film The Motherhood Archives by buying discarded 16mm film prints of maternal education films on eBay, and my search for 'helpful' and non-ideological texts led me to read a number of medical histories of obstetrical anaesthesia (books that I immediately liked because they were the only texts about pregnancy I could find that didn't feel prescriptive or bossy to me and that eventually became part of the historical research for my film) (Figure ). I also started recording my own startling, often-intense pregnancy anxiety dreams (of giving birth to rabbits, supermarket chickens, and giant pears), a practice that eventually expanded into my ongoing web-based participatory maternal anxiety archive The Worry Box Project (Figure ). So what has become a body of creative work on the maternal that I have worked on over the past decade emerged out of a moment of necessity and absence - a process of teaching myself a critical and historical language for thinking about pregnancy and childbirth as I moved through it as well as a process of struggling to find spaces where it felt OK to talk about maternal ambivalence.

I don't think I fully began to understand my work as having an activist or more explicitly political dimension until after I completed The Motherhood Archives and tried to get the film screened - this is the moment when I began to fully understand all the systematic ways that work on the maternal is marginalized/excluded by the culture industries that I participate in. So, this is the second moment that feels formative of my current thinking on maternal work. More on that below.

When I started sending The Motherhood Archives to film festivals, I tried at first not to be paranoid that programmers might be sexist about a film about maternal bodies. But, as forty festival rejections in a row accrued over the course of a year - including rejections from festivals that had shown all my previous work - I couldn't help also noticing how many programmers seemed to be men (and how many films on the documentary festival circuit were about 'masculine' topics: wars, resource extraction, fishing boats, genocides. Some of these are films that I love, but still it is hard to ignore that there is a gender problem in the world of nonfiction film exhibition). A couple of times programmers who turned my film down said things to me like, 'this film is a niche film for an academic feminist audience and not interesting to a general public,' or, 'the film is well-made but the topic is only interesting to other mothers,' or the classic 'my wife would be so interested in that!'

The documentary film world - broadly speaking the genre space where I articulate my creative practice - has long been premised on a tradition of curiosity about experiences other than one's own. No one would ever suggest that a film about strip mining in South Africa would only be of interest to other South African strip miners, or that a film about industrial fishing is only relevant to fishermen. But during my year of rejections I learned that maternity is treated again and again as a kind of exceptional thematic space that could only possibly be interesting to its subject; or, more insulting, that mothers make work about themselves because their world has been narrowed so drastically by the experience of mothering that they're unable to think about more important questions - a deep irony when you consider that birth and death are maybe the only two truly universal topics that we all have some kind of relationship with.

At first I found this response depressing and discouraging, but eventually - and much more productively - I started feeling enraged. Anger led me to new forms of action, organizing, and network-creation. I created a research group on maternity and creative practice, curated a gallery show and co-organized a symposium on the campus where I teach. I've come to understand that part of my job as a maternal activist is to actively advocate for maternal art and to create new kinds of conversation spaces - in the academy and beyond - where maternal work - and, more broadly, feminist work - is taken seriously.

The project I am working on now, ' Yours in Sisterhood,' is a performative, participatory documentary project based on archived letters written to the editor of Ms. Magazine between 1972-80 (Figure ). To make the project I am traveling to many different parts of the US with a portable teleprompter and a camera. In the community where each 70s letter was originally written, I invite a stranger to perform a reading of the letter and to respond to their reading. My project invites participants to engage affectively and empathetically with history and to listen deeply across time in order to consider the legacies of 70s women's movement today. While this new project is not explicitly maternal in subject matter, I think this work emerges directly from my maternal concerns with creating new spaces and networks of feminist conversation. It feels deeply connected to maternal ethics and maternal thinking, while at the same time it feels like a generative expansion of my previous work. In this new work I am thinking of maternal creative practice as a kind of ethics or form of engagement rather than an explicit or physical subject.

To do anything as activists we need robust, empathetic, inclusive, and feminist spaces of conversation.

Irene Lusztig is a US-based filmmaker, visual artist, archival researcher, and mother. Her film and video work mines old images and technologies for new meanings in order to reframe, recuperate, or reanimate forgotten and neglected histories. Often beginning with rigorous research in archives, her work brings historical materials into conversation with the present day, inviting viewers to explore historical spaces as a way of contemplating larger questions of politics, ideology, and the production of personal, collective, and national memories. Her debut feature film, Reconstruction (2001) was recognized with a Boston Society of Film Critics Discovery award and won best documentary at the New England Film Festival. She has explored issues around public feminism, language, and histories of women and women's bodies across many previous works, including the feature length archival film essay The Motherhood Archives (2013), the ongoing web-based Worry Box Project, Maternity Test (2014) and her newest work-in-progress, the performative documentary Yours in Sisterhood. Her work has been screened around the world, including at MoMA, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Anthology Film Archives, Pacific Film Archive, Flaherty NYC, IDFA Amsterdam, and on television. She has been awarded grants and fellowships from the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities, Massachusetts Cultural Council, LEF Foundation, New York State Council for the Arts, Sustainable Arts Foundation, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Rydell Visual Arts Foundation, and the Fulbright Scholar Program. She teaches filmmaking at UC Santa Cruz where she is Associate Professor of Film and Digital Media.

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Paula McCloskey (UK)

I started making activist work on the maternal when I became a mother. However, I trace my journey towards activist work on the maternal to my early life. I was born in Ireland. My working class Irish family did not engage with politics or the arts. My teenage parents fled their small border-town to get married. My mum a protestant and my dad catholic, we moved to England when I was an infant but then moved to Northern Ireland when I was a teenager. These were formative years in my journey to activism as it was a time of immense violence and political unrest in Ireland. I was an Irish girl in a Northern Irish school, but I had an English accent. I learnt about Irish history and became enthralled with feminism from an early age. I then went to India at seventeen for four months to work with homeless children - when I came back I left home. On completing a law degree in the UK, I took a Masters in social work. I then worked for several years with the most deprived families and communities, supporting and helping, but also fighting for and with. I always had a strong sense of social justice and, quite simply, I wanted to make the world better. I worked with dozens of mothers; women mothering in the direst circumstances, most of them caught of up in a system rife with mother-blaming. I chose my work carefully, trying to position myself in places that were open to challenging the system.

At twenty-five I became mother myself, in difficult circumstances. It was art that helped me to work-through my own maternal experience. I had what I would later term an art-encounter with the work of Louise Bourgeois. This art-encounter and its complex interaction with my early mothering (a maternal encounter, if you will) became the foundation for my PhD - a slow unravelling of the complex assemblage that constituted my subjectivity. As I started to write and draw about maternity and art I started to critically engage with my own life, as opposed to others. I am now a practising artist and researcher with a particular interest in maternal subjectivity. I am also co-founder of the critical, activist art practice A Place of their Own, which was born out of my early social and political work with families and communities and my developing maternal art research. A Place of their Own is made up of myself, my partner Sam Vardy (architect, artist and researcher), and our four young children. It is a way to name an acknowledgement of the importance of the relations for us between living with and raising our children and the various kinds of political, theoretical, spatial and artistic activity that we are both engaged with. Some of the central questions that we ask ourselves are: how might the family be understood as a site of knowledge? What might the radical potential of the family be in relation to our interests (i.e. searching for post-capitalist productions of subjectivity)? What place do aesthetic practices or encounters have in subjective transformation? What are the ethics of engaging children in creative activist activities? What are our ethical responsibilities as parents having a large family?

Recent work has included a 'staged' twenty-four-hour draw at home. One drawing an hour for twenty-four hours: a form of hyper-drawing as part of an ongoing practice to explore maternal subjectivity by the practice of drawing. In child waking hours I was interrupted by my keen audience, with the sounds of cartoons, fighting, laughing and the general 'hullaballoo' of everyday family life; art and family life happening together, at once. With A Place of their Own we are working on, as part of a series, a performance to explore the idea 'becoming-earth'. The series is a critical exploration of the idea of posthumanism in the context of what it means to be a family in the age of the Anthropocene, asking ourselves how we might re-imagine other subjectivities as we continually and collectively produce our own.

The work is constantly changing. This seems important. Experimenting with new activities, new ways of doing things, new concepts, new research, new technologies, new places, and people. It is integral to keep moving, keep having encounters and seeing what happens. Importantly, we are now at a point where resistance, creativity and everyday family life have become inseparable. I also have a better critical understanding of what I do and what we do as A Place of their Own. But it all still feels in its infancy. There's a lot I still want to do. All of it stems from becoming a mother, because becoming a mother changed me. Of course it did. Critically engaging with this change continues to be integral to what I do; from the shared sub-subjective encounter between myself and my unborn children, to the ongoing dynamic relation with my children. There is much to be learnt from the Maternal as an experience, a concept, as a method and as a thinking apparatus. For me, the Maternal is integral to how we live as humans, not just with our children but in how we encounter others; how we live with and connect with other humans, non-humans, the earth and the cosmos. In sum, the Maternal remains at the heart of what I do; it is woven in the fabric of what I do so that the different threads of mothering, art, activism and research are intertwined as part of daily life.

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Iris Anna Regn (USA)

I started turning thoughts about parenting into work on Father's Day 2008 when I co-organized one of Fritz Haeg's Sundown Salons (The Young Ones) with visual artist Joyce Campbell. For the Salon, in collaboration with Tim Durfee, I made two objects that dealt with issues of scale and perception between child and adult. The work and the conversations about the work expanded and progressed when I cofounded BROODWORK: Creative Practice and Family Life with Rebecca Niederlander (Figures , ). At the time my daughter was six, and by then I had talked enough with other parents to know that my intimate inner negotiations and processes around creativity were shared by a wider community.

Initially, I did not consider it activist work but did very much reflect on the universality of my very personal grapplings between creative practice and parenting. I am always interested in increasing participants' agency in their lives through art and design, and the initial impetus for BROODWORK (2009-2016) was to name the unnamed community of creative parents and even to celebrate the role that parenting can have in the creative endeavour. I only realized later that this was indeed a kind of activism but in a form that I had not previously encountered. That it took a while to embrace the idea of activism.

I was also specifically interested in a broad definition of parenting because we live in a time where - although not entirely balanced - the traditional role of Mother can now more evenly be distributed amongst caregivers of any gender. I see this as a sign of progress in our society as we navigate continuously changing roles. And Rebecca and I knew very soon that the overarching rubric for this very personal work that came initially from our experiences as Mothers was actually even larger than parenting, hence the emphasis from the beginning on the word Family.

The reception for the work has been heartfelt and genuine. It is work borne fundamentally out of love and commonality and carries within it an inherent optimism. In the first curatorial installation for BROODWORK, artists and designers like Laura Owens and Edgar Bryant, and Linda Taalman and Alan Koch made work specifically for the show. In our second installation at Otis College of Art and Design, we had pieces made for us by Dave Mueller, So-Il, Health and Beauty - on almost no budget! When I created Growth Table with Tim Durfee the piece went viral internationally on the web. It's also been published in three books (Figure ). It is quietly joyous and participants respond authentically to that portion of themselves.

The work around Family is part of a shared territory that touches many people closely. In particular, I think it speaks to my generation, that has grown up with a feminist education and is negotiating the growth of children and parents who are aging. This generation is also cognizant of the idea that mothering can be taught and that is as profound a cultural shift as any.

I feel like this work is most effective when it occupies different spheres - when it also exists outside, or next to, the world of art and design. For built work, I'm currently working on two scales, the domestic and the public. I continue to work on objects for living which instigate interaction between members of a "family". I am also working on public artwork, a piece with BROODWORK for the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, and one with Tim Durfee for the Department of Cultural Affairs in the Northeast Los Angeles Police Station. Both pieces consider how individuals comes together as a kind of family.

In 2014, I realized - perhaps because my daughter became a preteen - that teaching would be one of the strongest expressions of Family. I began teaching in the incredible Otis College of Art and Design's Creative Action department in which I form interdisciplinary teams of students to work on varied projects in service to community partners (which are in my case an elementary school and an organization that deals with incarcerated youth). I set up my college juniors to consider their work on art and design projects while themselves being in the simultaneous role of children and parents, i.e., of students and mentors.

Lastly, I have work that I do specifically around my daughter's life, where I intentionally model the power of art and design and community making. Over the last three years, I've created a yearly all-arts, all-school, all-family event at my daughter's school, exhibiting work from pre-K through high school. We also have an interactive silkscreen workshop with revisionist school logos created by a parent, a secondary student, and an elementary school student. For the design of silkscreens, flyers, and banners, I've curated in parents who are artists like Laura Purdy and Kim West. The art creates a non-verbal bond between generations and for some parents this is really the first time they will have made art with their children.

What has shifted fundamentally between the first and the latest projects is my perception as a creative practitioner of the roles of the Mother/Teacher/Mentor and the Child/Student/Apprentice. Through doing this work I have become very certain about the importance of being on both sides of the equation. I feel more confident about my work in this arena now and somewhat clearer about how to unfurl it. I'm trained as an architect and think a lot about scale, for example, not only how people are affected by the design of private space but also how they navigate the City. The progression from Child/Mother to Family/City is also one of scale. I think about how the smallest urban increment - like a sign - can affect an entire neighborhood.

I think that my initial bias against what I understood as activist and political was based on models of activism as anti-something versus pro-something. But just as teaching can be a kind of positive activism - and I use the term 'teaching' broadly - so too there are other huge opportunities outside of the usual structure of the art world that can be accessed through this lens. The Maternal offers a way of seeing, making, and activating that starts and ends with connection. We do not know where it is headed but it will lead to growth.

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Shira Richter (Israel)

The maternal state of mind has been a driving force and central research question guiding my work since before I became a mother. It started back in the 2000s (my thirties) with a seemingly unconnected incident- falling in love with a man. The fear of losing him, specifically to war, awakened me to the fact that I am deaf and dumb regarding 'big picture' politics that decide the nature of this world, specifically the ongoing violent conflict of the area I live in (Israel-Palestine). Where are the women's and mother's voices in this darn bloody conflict that is taking our loved ones? I started asking: why is it that women, who grow people in their bodies, whose time and energies are invested in safely raising human beings, remain silent? What person invests so much into something - a son, or daughter - to just give it away to war, no questions asked? In answer to these questions I created what became an award winning film, Two States of Mind, in which I follow two women activists, one Palestinian and one Israeli, on their quest for peace. No woman is a prophet in her own land, and most of the acclaim for my film and its message came from outside of Israel. A decade after I educated audiences at dozens of screenings in several countries about UN Resolution 1325, which is the essence of the film, it has become one of Israel's women's groups' central issues. It is common knowledge that women and gender studies departments were created because of grassroots feminist activism. I like to think my work has helped prepare the grounds for both in my country.

Transforming into a real flesh-and-lots-of-blood mother of twin boys impacted my work considerably. Living in a country obsessed with demographics which idolizes having children and penalizes those who don't, you'd think a mother's path would be paved with gold. I was shocked to discover the opposite; the way the medical establishment, society, the law and my own family, treated new mothers. In response I developed a provocative art-photography text and video project The Mother Daughter and Holy Spirit - one of the first artworks in Israel to expose postpartum mid-body skin texture as a topographic land (Figures , , and ). Realizing the body-and-soul work of women-mothers is too often invisibilized, I made the invisible visibly huge (through large-format photographic prints). I wanted to expose the secrets and especially prices women mothers pay. Humans tend to value things and actions that have a high price tag. Motherhood seemed to have no price tag whatsoever.

I will never forget the reaction to my 2005 visual lecture at a national doctor and midwifery conference in Nazareth in which I lectured with this series of photographs. I was sure I would be preaching to the converted, so you can imagine my surprise when more than half of the audience - all practicing midwives - tried to delegitimize the postpartum experience I communicated via the works. 'This is your experience, it's not other women's experiences' they said. Luckily, there was one powerful midwife in the audience, Mindy Levy, who stood up for the angle I presented. Since then, a lot has changed. Knowledge has spread, both via my projects and others, but there is still so much to do. Postpartum depression is still mostly relegated to 'genes' and 'the personal' and psychiatric treatment, while most ignore the socio-political and economic context. In those years, political activism and art didn't go together in Israel. Or better put, 'political' was relegated mostly to art/films about the Israel-Palestine conflict. Today this project is considered ground-breaking by almost every gender studies department in Israel. While I have been supported critically, I have also been told (by a prominent gallerist) 'your art is good...why ruin it by mixing it with politics?' A chief museum photography curator told me 'it's not art' and another museum director said the work was too provocative for her museum, and in yet another memorable incident I was told by gay male cultural intellectuals with leading positions at University and Art departments that the subject of motherhood was 'passé' (this was around 2009). My favourite incident is the time my works were censored LIVE in a TV interview about an exhibition on postpartum depression (the footage can be seen here). 'You guys (TV broadcasters) screen awful bloody violence wall to wall and you can't deal with artistic photos of a postpartum body?' said Nurit Tal-Tenne, the curator, who was as shocked as I was that the works were censored.

Who did get it? They deserve mentioning: One curator whose doctorate is specifically about Mothers (Dr. Hadara Scheflan Katzav), another curator who was brave enough to exhibit The Mother, Daughter, and Holy Spirit at the municipal public gallery she managed (Varda Ginosar), motherhood researchers (a handful), a few enlightened midwifes, and most audiences.

I feel the work of mothering holds the secret to a caring humanity. I feel this secret has been trampled and ignored and belittled and exhausted by our current practices, in almost every discipline. It is the most tragic missing piece in our world. It is obvious we have no idea what care really is, and how mothering encompasses the knowledge of accepting - and learning about - and developing with; a different 'other'. Body and soul. It may be idealistic but I think strong conscious mothers and mothering traits in everyone will create a healthier world.

Shira Richter is a multi-inter-disciplinary Israeli-American award winning feminist Artist Researcher, film maker, Visual Performance Lecturer, Curator, Writer and activist specializing in ARTiculating the socio-economic, gender specific and artistic politics of motherhood/care-work/unpaid labor, in large scale projects; Photography, Text, and Visual-Performance-Lecture. Her projects intentionally act as an interface, or 'multi-bridge' between academic knowledge, art, and contemporary activism. Award winning adventure film Two States of Mind investigates women's voices about war, Photography text and video-art exhibition The Mother Daughter and Holy Spirit exposes the secret prices involved in the transition into motherhood. Large scale light photography, text and video Installation Invisible Invaluables addresses the global value of unpaid care labor. Visual Performance Lecture/s Hot Potato called Mama exposes the cross - discipline value and erasure of mothers.

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Lena Šimić (Croatia/United Kingdom)
Being a mother throws me beyond myself, in relation to others, in relation to the world I am in.
I always try to begin by stating my position. That doesn't always go as well as I'd like. I state my position: I am a mother, I am an artist, I am a feminist, I am an activist. I state my position to you. I state my position to the invisible readers. I speak at academic conferences, at arts events. I put myself on the line. Here we go again.

There she goes again, another mother/artist. And feminist. Moreover, an activist. Well, which parent isn't, for their kids? All of them obnoxious parents who want the best for their spoilt kids. She is one of them, with the best kids ever. Well, she thinks so, anyhow. She probably breastfed them until they were five, she thinks she reinvented motherhood. She's one of them. Let's just wait and see how the kids rebel.

All art is political; it appears in the society we are in. It showcases socio-political structures: it conforms to the politics of today, it goes against them. Art makes itself visible in a certain context. It appears, it is perceived, it is allowed, it is welcomed, it is rejected, it makes itself clear, it takes place and time. Even when all art is political, all art is not necessarily open about its politics, its ideological position. I co-organize the Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home, an art activist initiative in my family home in Liverpool, UK. The Institute is anarchist and feminist. It is anti-capitalist. It is funded by 10 % of the family's income. As a family we dissent, we say no to the injustices around us. We ally ourselves with social movement for ecological justice. We speak out (Figures and ).

I am keen to make the structures visible, the ones of the heteronormative nuclear family, the ones of the institutions I inhabit temporarily or on a longer term basis, the ones of the artworks I create, the ones of this writing. I am interested in the here/now. There's a proliferation of mother/artists these days - most of them in their late thirties/early forties, the ones who are able to speak, to be heard, to make themselves visible. I belong to this group. Here I am being interviewed. My voice matters in this context.

Once upon a time I used to attend two toddler groups, Lark Lane and Unitarian Church on Ullet Road, both in Liverpool, UK. I was a mother to two toddlers, aged one and three. Back in 2004 I made my first performance about being a mother - Medea/Mothers' Clothes - which juxtaposed archetypal anti-mother figure with contemporary mothers from these two toddler groups. I was on stage holding the juxtaposition. I was washing the clothes of the toddler groups' mothers in a small baby bath, I was making my position as a foreigner (Croatian living in Britain) clear through the ongoing recorded dialogue, I was using Medea's story as a provocation whilst trying to make sense of the maternal ambivalence that overwhelmed me.

I took the world of the two toddler groups into the city centre art gallery, the Bluecoat. Since my first performance in 2004, I performed this piece around the UK, in Croatia and Cuba. I revived the piece, as a mother of four boys now, in Bratislava Slovakia just last February (Figure ). I remember a student in Scarborough standing up from the audience, thanking me for the piece, because it allowed her to think it is possible to be a mother and artist. She was pregnant. I got an email the other day from a student in Liverpool saying 'for years this artwork inspired me greatly which led me to do a feminist piece for my recent exam'. These responses matter to me as they are from a new generation of women performance makers who might become mothers one day. It is my hope they will enter the art world which is much less judgemental about mother/artists. It is my great desire that they will create their own artworks and autonomous collectives which don't rely on the recognition from hierarchical art world structures. And most of all, it is my deep belief that they will help reshape and change current socio-political structures and finally overthrow the system of neoliberalism, global free-market capitalism, which creates injustice, inequality and is damaging to the ecosystem we all depend on.
Being a mother throws me beyond myself, in relation to others, in relation to the world I am in.
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A very slight afterword

I have very little to add to the above responses other than to say what a privilege it has been to gather these thoughts together and share them with the readership of Studies in the Maternal. The above responses attest not only to the range of 'mamactivist' practice internationally, but both implicitly and explicitly to the fact that 'mamactivist art' is nothing new - one need only remember the founding of the collective , early performances by Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Mary Kelly's Post-Partum Document, or Lea Lublin's 1968 Mon Fils to be assured of this fact. Informed by the pioneering art-activist work of these foremothers, the artists represented here take the maternal not as a biological facticity, but a rich feminist site of political intervention, one that is attentive to the maternal "as an experience, a concept, as a method and as a thinking apparatus" (McCloskey) that "unearths alternative social and political possibilities and models of being in the world" (Donogue). While this edited forum offers a rich set of such alternative possibilities, my hope is that it leaves the reader wanting more, and thus might be considered as a first step, a forerunner to a more in depth inquiry into mapping artistic approaches to the maternal today.

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In winter of 2016 I sent a call out to a group of artists that we could loosely define as mamactivists. I asked these activist-mother-artists if they would be willing to respond to a set of questions for an edited section of this special issue of Studies in the Maternal, and asked them to please forward the request to any other artists they felt fit the call.

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I've been stewing about this post for months. MONTHS, people. I wanted it to be perfect: Clear. Concise. Informative. Witty. Earnest. Knowing. Comforting. Wise.

Bah!

My need for perfection is completely counterproductive to this discussion and a direct slap in the face of my intent, but it took me until just this second to realize that. What can I say? I'm slow like that sometimes. Settle in, folks, and let's chat, mother to mother, mother to father, parent to parent, failure to failure.

Once upon a time there was a man named Donald Winnicott. He was a pediatrician and psychoanalyst in mid-20th century Britian. For psychology wonks like me, he is a rock star. I learned about him in graduate school and he changed my life for the better. He's not cool enough to have cured cancer, but his theories were significant enough to include in my wedding vows. And that tells you something about me -- I included psychoanalytic theory in my marriage vows. God bless Mary Tyler Dad.

This man taught me everything I know about mothering.

Winnicott developed a theory in 1953 called the 'Good Enough Mother.' Now before I upset any Dads in the house, know that this theory, in my belief, applies to you as well. But in 1953, there weren't a hell of a lot of stay-at-home dads running around. And those that did exist were probably shunned a bit. So please understand Winnicott's language and theories through their historical context.

In a nut-shell and in Winnicott's own words:

A mother is neither good nor bad nor the product of illusion, but is a separate and independent entity: The good-enough mother .. starts off with an almost complete adaptation to her infant's needs, and as time proceeds she adapts less and less completely, gradually, according to the infant's growing ability to deal with her failure. Her failure to adapt to every need of the child helps them adapt to external realities.

The failure Winnicott refers to is not specific to bad things that mothers do that damage their children, but instead, the perception of the child as the child grows and develops that Mom is no longer able to "fix" everything or make it all better. No parent can ever meet every single need of a child from the child's point of view. If this were true, the toddler temper tantrum would not exist. Think about those states of mind kids get into with the dramatic mood swings and crazy demands. No way in freaking hell that those whims should be catered to by a parent, hence the concept of a parent's "failure."

When I first read this theory, I was about as far away from parenting as one could get. I was single, living in a dimly lit studio apartment in Chicago, working half-time and going to graduate school full time. The whole concept of parenting was not on my radar. I was in my mid-20s and way more interested in dating, clubbing, learning and, as I fondly like to say, "developing a personality." Because I was such a squirrel growing up -- no interest in sex, drugs, or rock and roll -- I embraced the late bloomer thing fully at this stage. So, yeah, parenting was not on my agenda.

But those words -- good enough -- spoke to me in a way that made an impression. I carried them with me, mentally, and applied them as needed. The graduate school mantra of "turn something in," regarding papers, etc. was nothing more than "good enough" applied to course work. The Christmas gifts hastily purchased and wrapped just moments before they were opened were "good enough." Throwing all my laundry into one load was "good enough," as clean skivvies were more valued than spending $ on small loads of properly-sorted piles.

After Mary Tyler Dad proposed to me, I applied the concept of "good enough" to our wedding planning -- nothing fancy, nothing spectacular, no Bridezilla here. Truth be told, Mary Tyler Dad was way more freaked out on our wedding day than I was. The food was okay, the dress was acceptable, the wine was passing. Somehow, though, the total effect was sublime.

'Good enough' had served me well in the planning of the wedding, so I decided to integrate it into my marriage by vowing to be the "good enough wife and mother." I take my vows seriously. Irish sentimentalist that I am, I laminated copies for Mary Tyler Dad and I right after the honeymoon that we both carry in our wallets. I wanted those words to be more than fancy promises, so my vows were about Cheerios, work-life balance and good enough wifing and mothering.

The concept frees me with its liberation from expectations. I never have to be perfect, I only have to be good enough. If you read further into Winnicott's theory, you learn that striving for perfection is a sure path to screwing your kids up in epic proportions.

Something else to recognize is that my version of good enough is going to be vastly different than your version of good enough. What is acceptable to me just might be considered neglect by others. And what you consider standard practice is something I might never condone for Mary Tyler Son. That sounds extreme, but my infamous Facebook car seat debacle was proof that parenting standards are hard core personal.

My point is this: Embrace the concept of "Good Enough." Breathe it in, breathe it out. Let it wrap around you and soothe your tired, worried, guilty soul. You will fail your child. You will. It will happen. Some of us do it daily. Some more spectacularly than others. What Winnicott tells us though, assures us from his mid-century psychoanalytic throne, is that it is okay. Everything is going to be okay.

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I've been stewing about this post for months. MONTHS, people. I wanted it to be perfect: Clear. Concise. Informative. Witty. Earnest. Knowing. Comforting. Wise. Bah! My need for perfection is completely counterproductive to this discussion and a direct slap in the face of my intent, but it took me until just this second to realize that.

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...my wonderful mother who drank herself to death

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I hate it when people who didn't know you ask me how you died. As soon as I tell them you were an alcoholic, I know exactly the kinds of thoughts running through their heads. That one word conjures a vivid, stereotypical picture. You were violent. You were neglectful. You weren't a good mother. I had a horrible childhood. You damaged me.

But that's not how it was. You were a wonderful mother and I had a golden childhood. You gave me everything a child needs and more. You loved me, supported me, invested your time and money in me and cultivated a deep mother-daughter bond between us. I miss waking up in the middle of the night to find you kneeling by my bed and stroking my hair. I miss the way you took care of me when I was ill. I miss your cuddles and kisses and the strong, heady scent of your expensive perfume.

You really did lead a charmed life. You were married to a good man who provided for you and took care of you. You were never short of money, attention or love. You were the life and soul of the party and people flocked around you. You were strikingly beautiful and unfailingly kind. From the outside, you had it all.

When you were drunk you became nasty and spat out horrible, unforgivable words. It wasn't like you at all

Yet appearances can be deceptive. You weren't happy and it's taken a long time for me to understand why. You always said you loved me more than I could ever understand and you would die for me. But then you did die and it wasn't for me.

When you started drinking, it was a bit funny. "Oh, Mum's drunk again," we would giggle at parties, as you stumbled around talking nonsense. As the years rolled on, it became increasingly less funny. You changed beyond recognition and when you were drunk you became nasty and spat out horrible, unforgivable words. It wasn't like you at all. I became accustomed to compartmentalising my feelings - the love and respect I had for my mum and the fear and loathing I had of this drunken stranger.

Things progressed badly and the drunken stranger took the steering wheel. My beloved mum gave up the fight. Your marriage fell apart and you lost your home. You were irreparably broken. I was young and selfish and, more importantly, I understood nothing of life or loss.

I've spent many years feeling guilty because I didn't do more to help you. If this happened today, things would be very different. I'm a mother now and used to putting others before myself. I know what I should have done to understand you and help you. If only I could turn back time and be the daughter I should have been, perhaps you would still be alive today. At the time, I did nothing except feel sorry for myself. I blamed you. I was at a loss to understand what you had to be so deeply unhappy about. You had a perfect life and you chucked it all away.

Today, I see you with the compassion of a fellow mother and wife. Life experience has provided me with valuable perspective as to how you really felt. I am able to piece together all the little clues you subconsciously gave me until I can see the whole picture. I have suffered some heart-breaking losses, the first of which was you.

I used to be angry with you for hurting me and then leaving me. I then spent many years feeling guilty and blaming myself for your demise. Finally, I am now able to disentangle myself from all these feelings and treat everyone involved in your story with compassion. If I could have just two minutes with you today, I would take both your hands in mine and say: "I love you and I understand." Anonymous

We'd love to hear your stories

* We will pay £25 for every Letter to (please write about 600-700 words), Playlist, Snapshot or We Love to Eat we publish. Write to Family Life, The Guardian, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU or email family@theguardian.com. Please include your address and phone number. We are only able to reply to those whose contributions we are going to use

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A letter to ... My wonderful mother, who drank herself to death

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I hate it when people who didn't know you ask me how you died. As soon as I tell them you were an alcoholic, I know exactly the kinds of thoughts running through their heads. That one word conjures a vivid, stereotypical picture. You were violent. You were neglectful.

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... anyone who is shocked that I don't like my mother.

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Every year on Mothering Sunday, sons and daughters buy flowers and other gifts to celebrate their mother, articles come out glorifying motherhood (and sententiously instructing everyone to "call Mum"), and the pressure is enormous. Because, you see, my mother gave me hell.

She was rarely physically abusive; she is much cleverer than that. Everything is in the realm of plausible deniability. Why does she give me the cold shoulder for months? Who knows, but if confronted, she denies it. Why is there rank favouritism between me and my siblings and grandchildren? Not possible: strictly my imagination.

The sad fact is, some women who give birth, who may think of themselves as loving, are long on control and short on love

When people assume that those who have given birth automatically know how to feel (and express) "motherly love", it only makes things worse. The assumption creates a mystique about the mother-child relationship that damages those raised by a mother who doesn't know how to love. Many spend their lives wondering what is wrong with them, and why their mothers don't behave lovingly. To have society then tell them that their mother is a de facto source of love to be adulated is brutal.

Are times always difficult for children (adult or not) in our situation? Ironically, no. In classic abuser cycles, our mothers will reel us in with kind phrases and expressions of support. Desperate to think that we are worthy of our mother's acceptance, we cautiously take the bait. Once she is sure of our submission, the manipulation begins again.

The sad fact is, some women who give birth - and who may think of themselves as very loving - are long on control and short on love. These mothers may seem proud and supportive of their children, but in private are critical and naysaying. Their superficial charm isolates us, as outsiders can't understand why we would not want to spend time with such lovely people. Mothers such as this play the victim beautifully: with tears in their eyes, they will tell others (particularly relatives, because they might get involved on their behalf) that they don't understand what they could have done ... while giving the silent treatment to said daughter or son for months over a perceived slight.

After years of being blamed for the problems in our relationship, I have had enough. This Mothering Sunday, those of my children who wish to may accompany me to lunch (my treat), and those who are not available will be loved vocally nonetheless. I will not be calling Mum. And I will not feel guilty about it. She has had her chance; sadly, while she thinks that her relationship with me is the only one where she has difficulties, her grandchildren see her manipulations and don't want any part of them. Because they are still young and trying to be kind, they don't let her know this. But the chickens have come home to roost, and my mother is sensing their lack of willingness to engage with her and is panicking.

To those of you lucky enough to have mothers you want to celebrate, do it with love and enthusiasm. But please, please, when you hear someone respond less than positively about their mother ... don't act as though they are somehow deficient and it's their fault. If nothing else, celebrate your own mother's love and care by showering it on that person who never had it.

We'd love to hear your stories

* We will pay £25 for every Letter to (please write about 600-700 words), Playlist, Snapshot or We Love to Eat we publish. Write to Family Life, The Guardian, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU or email family@theguardian.com. Please include your address and phone number. We are only able to reply to those whose contributions we are going to use

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A letter to ... Anyone who is shocked that I don't like my mother

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Every year on Mothering Sunday, sons and daughters buy flowers and other gifts to celebrate their mother, articles come out glorifying motherhood (and sententiously instructing everyone to "call Mum"), and the pressure is enormous. Because, you see, my mother gave me hell. She was rarely physically abusive; she is much cleverer than that.

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British Council Film: Men Talk About Mother

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How much of our mother can we really know? This animated documentary explores three men's recollec

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FEATURED ARTIST:
JANE MCADAM FREUD
INFORMATION:

03 JULY - 15 AUGUST 2015

Gazelli Art House presents Mother Mould a solo exhibition of new work by Jane McAdam Freud. The artist's latest sculptural endeavour contemplates 'the mould' in sculptural and metaphorical terms. The internationally acclaimed artist and daughter of Lucian Freud creates a further connection referring to the mother as the source, alternatively to her previous exploration of the role of the father. This exhibition examines the mother as a container for shaping and replicating forms. "Naturally we are all 'moulded' by our mothers experience from birth."

DOWNLOAD PRESS RELEASE

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FEATURED ARTIST: JANE MCADAM FREUD INFORMATION: 03 JULY - 15 AUGUST 2015 Gazelli Art House presents Mother Mould a solo exhibition of new work by Jane McAdam Freud. The artist's latest sculptural endeavour contemplates 'the mould' in sculptural and metaphorical terms. The internationally acclaimed artist and daughter of Lucian Freud creates a further connection referring to the mother as the source, alternatively to her previous exploration of the role of the father.

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Beautiful work, drawing on his life experiences (growing up in a small industrial village in Italy and spending time in his mother’s upholsery workshop.

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One afternoon I went to my mother's workshop where she used to work as upholsterer and on one of the shelves, filled with soft materials, there was a pile of felt. I gently slid my hand through the sheets and enjoyed for a while the warmth and softness.

The cause

About ten years ago my mother got ill, we were all shocked and unprepared to deal with something so big. I quickly quit my life in order to help my family and in particular my mother. She died in just a year during which there was no real improvement but only the uncertainty of the cures combined with our determination to take each step in order to find a way through. During this time I was unable to do any art work, my head was always focused on daily chores and keeping myself together. But I had a feeling of hope and I was desperate to see my mother recover, even when the doctors said there was not much time left.

Square after square

I took some sheets of felt with me not sure yet what to do with them but I had a vague idea to sew all the squares together to make a blanket or some sort of cover. I cut 100 squares 20 x 20 cm each and sewed them together with blue yarn. Felt is a non woven material and the one used in upholstery is made with recycled fabric. It is soft but also very loose, this is the reason why stitching the squares of felt together with thick yarn is a procedure which requires care in order to avoid the fabric breaking apart. I spent hours trying to keep the squares together, worrying about the unreliability of the material I was using. A slow operation, able to keep me awake and away from my fears but close to a place where I could recover if needed. Or where I could find company and comfort, the same place shared by anyone an atavistic place of tranquillity.

Embroidering walking elephants and sheep

With the same blue yarn used to sew the felt squares together I embroidered the border of the blanket with a procession of elephants and lambs. These animals are found in myth, religion and culture since ancient civilisations carrying slightly different meanings but some of these connotations had a heavier impact than others. I chose the elephant because as many writers, poets and travellers have suggested, it symbolises strength, greatness and dignity, either divine or human, characteristics rarely found among other species in the animal kingdom. As I was brought up in a Catholic environment, the lamb refers to the Christian symbol of innocence gentleness, peacefulness and patience under suffering. Walking elephants and lambs in a circle in an endless slow, safe motion producing peace, calm, endurance and ultimately protection; this is the place I stitched together with the same slow and attentive care in order to avoid any break, separation or alteration.

Concentric concentration

Much like the daily praying of some religious orders, which in the enclosed space of a monastery, would walk slowly following the arcades and find concentration in the concentric architecture of the cloister, I chose to practice a daily routine involving this simple, constant cyclic action, in order to keep my attention focused and calm. One morning I woke up very upset because of a bad dream. Walking through the bedroom I accidentally stepped on the blanket and tore apart some of the stitched felt squares. I was loosing my concentration. The loss was immense. Soon anger took over and ruled me for many years.

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One afternoon I went to my mother's workshop where she used to work as upholsterer and on one of the shelves, filled with soft materials, there was a pile of felt. I gently slid my hand through the sheets and enjoyed for a while the warmth and softness.

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Artist, writer, curator...

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I found it so hard to clear up my mother's things after she died. Bundling them away felt like bundling her away. And seeing her life reduced to a few meagre possessions was heartbreaking, and made me feel like I hadn't been a good enough daughter, though I knew that in life, she wanted to exercise...

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Documenting 'what I do'.

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Good enough mother!

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I offended a close friend the other day by calling her a good mother. The friend was telling me about her weekend plans, which involved National Trust properties and back-to-back kids' clubs and parties.

As a weekend of nothingness yawned ahead of me, I praised her mothering skills. I genuinely meant this, but I should have known better: because to commend someone on their mothering skills these days is a backhanded compliment.

My friend cried "I AM NOT A GOOD MOTHER," and then reeled off a list of ways in which I was wrong.

You see, for my generation - the Y Generation - "imperfect mothering" is the trend du jour. Late twenties to early forties mums are revelling in the freeing feeling that we don't have to do things "right".

Websites like my own, Selfish Mother, and blogs such as The Unmumsy Mum and Hurrah for Gin have given credence to warts-and-all motherhood, with an almost competitive amusement in how laissez-faire our parenting is.

At Selfish Mother, our bestselling top is one that says "WINGING IT". Last year's surprise hit TV show was Catastrophe, which saw Sharon Horgan encapsulate the imperfect mum who felt like an outsider because she wasn't doing things "right" and in the autumn the BBC launches a much-anticipated comedy, also written by Horgan, called Motherland.

And the new film, Bad Moms, which opens this week, is another celebration of women letting loose and sticking it to the unrealistic expectations placed on mothers.

With Sex and the City, we related to bad dates, best-friend bust ups and caring too much about our clothes; the characters in Bad Moms bond over boozy brunches, falling off bar stools and "muddling through" motherhood.

This is the backlash against high standards inflicted on the generation of mums slightly before us, when Nigella Lawson's Domestic Goddess book was on everyone's Christmas list; every new mother got a copy of Gina Ford's strict baby routine book; the National Childbirth Trust fixated on the "right" way to give birth, and the only online parenting website was Mumsnet - with forums obsessing over tiny details like which "sippy" cup to give your toddler. Perfectly slim, perfectly dressed, perfectly poised: motherhood was approaching fetishisation.

The new generation of mums are more likely to say "f--- the birth plan" and "what is a sippy cup?". We realise that trying to do everything "right" can only lead to anxiety and stress.

Because the truth is that on the whole, parenting standards are better than ever. Skip back a few decades, when "latchkey kids" let themselves in after school, kids' tea was Marmite on toast with Angel Delight for pudding, and few people had even heard of the word "parenting".

Research by a leading sociologist at Oxford University in 2010 found today's parents are spending triple the amount of time with their children than the previous generation did. That's despite the fact that many more couples are now both working (in 1971 around 23 per cent of mothers were employed; today the figure is 68 per cent).

A friend remembers how, when she and her brother were six and eight, her parents would pop into the local pub for a drink and leave them in the car in the pub car park. My mum confesses that she didn't find having three kids under five too stressful because she wasn't expecting it to be perfect, so she wasn't stressed out when it wasn't a bed of roses.

The new interest in imperfect mothering suggests we're starting to take a leaf out of our parents' books, relaxing our standards a bit and revelling in honesty.

The reason I launched Selfish Mother in 2013 was that I felt at wits' end trying to follow all the "rules" with a toddler and a new baby. I had an epiphany that to do things in my own haphazard way was far better for my mindset, and therefore better for us all.

Sarah Turner, aka The Unmumsy Mum, had a similar feeling: "I started the blog because most of the parenting literature I read online felt at odds with how I was finding it all. I decided I would start documenting parenthood exactly as I found it: the good, the bad and the sleep-deprived ugly. I think the success of the blog rests in its honesty. My pictures aren't very glossy, our experiences aren't sugar-coated. It's just real life. The majority of messages I receive are along the lines of 'Thank God, it's not just me!'"

Credit: Alamy

Her book, charting the "hilarious highs and emotional lows of motherhood", has been in this year's Top 5 bestseller list for 11 weeks.

All of this honesty and solidarity in the face of kid-induced life chaos is brilliant at more than just surface level, because women now feel they can talk about anything. Things that were pushed under the carpet before - such as postnatal depression, anxiety or just how bloody hard it is - are now very much out there. This can only be healthy. One mum I spoke to, who has kids in their teens, says that she'd wished all this 'honest' media had been around when she had her first baby; as she battled post-natal depression without any support system. Now, you can simply share a Facebook or Instagram post on the subject and you'll get a ton of support.

However, some folk have wondered if we're now veering too much the other way - with mums almost competitively saying how "crap" they are, and failing to mention when they do things well. If they bake a cake for instance, they'll probably say something very self-depreciating. Because, just like my friend, nobody wants to be seen as being that "good" mum.

As an antidote, Telegraph journalist Lucy Denyer wrote a brilliant piece for Selfish Mother recently about how she loves that archetypal Fifties mum activity: housework. She says "It's quite common when I see my mum friends to roll our eyes at the state of our homes and dismiss their untidiness as a badge of something like pride. But the truth is, I love it when my house is clean and tidy. Admitting to domesticity may not be the done thing these days, but it does feel great for me as a person."

Credit: photonica

And I guess that is the key. While we lower our parenting standards it's helpful to also pat ourselves on the back and admit when we do something that one of those imaginary 'perfect' mums would do.

Like the fact that last night I got my kids to bed at 6.30pm and read them an hour's worth of children's books instead of letting them stay up late and watch the iPad like they sometimes do. My sons and I all benefited as a result.

So, it isn't actually bad to mix parenting styles. Probably the most healthy type of motherhood is "good" and "bad" all rolled into one.
The Bad Mum Look Sweatshirt, £45, The Fmly Store Rucksack with changing mat, £115, Tiba & Marl Sunglasses, about £34, LB Necklace, £20, Follow The Cult
You've Got This Mama mug, £11.99, Scandiborn
Molly Gunn is the editor of SelfishMother.com

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I offended a close friend the other day by calling her a good mother. The friend was telling me about her weekend plans, which involved National Trust properties and back-to-back kids' clubs and parties. As a weekend of nothingness yawned ahead of me, I praised her mothering skills.

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Motherhood and an ambitious artistic career 

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Motherhood and an ambitious artistic career 

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Doing it all....

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But then my son came and that worry dissolved, because motherhood did not change my identity or curtail my ambition-it only reinforced it. While it did, of course, create logistical obstacles to navigate, it also made me more efficient with my time, and more motivated. I wasn't just working hard for myself anymore, but now for my son, too. By and large, other art-world mothers I spoke with over the past year, and many artists I interviewed for this story, feel that parenting becomes one more life challenge to grapple with, but a choice that ultimately has enriched their lives and careers, more than hindering them.

So why, then, would this myth-that having children ruins a female artist's career-still linger? Marina Abramović recently made headlines by telling German newspaper Der Tagesspiegel: "In my opinion [having children is] the reason why women aren't as successful as men in the art world. There are plenty of talented women. Why do men take over the important positions? It's simple. Love, family, children-a woman doesn't want to sacrifice all of that." Her sentiments sparked anger and heated debate. (Lest not we forget, other women artists have spouted similar sentiments, including Tracey Emin).

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You Can Be a Mother and Still Be a Successful Artist

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But then my son came and that worry dissolved, because motherhood did not change my identity or curtail my ambition-it only reinforced it. While it did, of course, create logistical obstacles to navigate, it also made me more efficient with my time, and more motivated.

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Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson and his mother Guðrún Ásmundsdóttir were interviewed by Tine Colstrup at the Art Alive festival in May 2016 at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark.

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Ragnar Kjartansson
On Stage with his Mother

The "mother with child" is one of the oldest clichés in the art historical vocabulary. Performance artist Ragnar Kjartansson grew up in the theatre with an actress-mother who attuned him to what he calls "the realness of fakeness."

"Clichés are such a fundamental thing in our language and imagination," says Ragnar Kjartansson, whose work with his own mother draws on centuries of art. Every five years Kjartansson's own mother spits on her son for several minutes in front of a camera as a part of the ongoing performance work "Me & My Mother". His mother an actress, Kjartansson spent ample amounts in and around the theatre as a child but discovered as an adult that what interested him was the situation created on stage, rather than the narrative: "I became interested in creating these situations that are sculptural," he explains of his move into performance art.

Ragnar Kjartansson (b. 1976) is an Icelandic artist, whose work ranges from paintings and drawings to videos, music and performance. Among Kjartansson's works is his six-hour video 'A Lot of Sorrow', which shows the indie rock band The National onstage before a live audience in the VW Dome at MoMA PS1 in New York in 2013 (http://channel.louisiana.dk/video/kjartanssonthe-national-lot-sorrow). In 2009, at the age of 33, Kjartansson became the youngest artist ever to represent Iceland at the Venice Biennale. Kjartansson's work has been exhibited widely around the world, from the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston to BAWAG Contemporary in Vienna. In 2011, he won the inaugural Malcolm Award at Performa 11 and in 2014 he was shortlisted for the Artes Mundi prize. He lives in Reykjavik, Iceland.

Ragnar Kjartansson and his mother Guðrún Ásmundsdóttir were interviewed by Tine Colstrup at the Art Alive festival in May 2016 at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark.

Camera: Jakob Solbakken & Rasmus Quistgaard
Edited by: Kasper Bech Dyg
Produced by: Kasper Bech Dyg
Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2016

Supported by Nordea-fonden

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Ragnar Kjartansson: On Stage with his Mother

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The "mother with child" is one of the oldest clichés in the art historical vocabulary. Performance artist Ragnar Kjartansson grew up in the theatre with an actress-mother who attuned him to what he calls "the realness of fakeness."

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http://www.girlshitartist.com

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Mother and Daughter bonds - work by Derby artist, Tracey King

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Mother and Daughter bonds - work by Derby artist, Tracey King

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Motherless Daughters is a body of sculptural works in porcelain, bronze, plaster and wax which have a personal resonance and are inspired by my interest in the maternal role and mother-daughter...

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WHEN Chantal Akerman's hyperrealist homage to ritualistic domesticity, Jeanne Dielman 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 1975, Akerman settled down in the back of the room and observed the crowd. As the film progressed, a stream of audience members left, their chairs echoing their dismissals with loud smacks. Marguerite Duras, whose film India Song also screened at the festival, stood up at the end of the film and yelled, "This woman's crazy!" Akerman, explosive at times, began to throw back defenses, but Delphine Seyrig, the star of both films, silenced her. The next day, after 50 people requested the film for festivals, it was clear. Cinema was hungry for Akerman.

Young but hardly a novice when Jeanne Dielman screened, Akerman had already established herself as a serious filmmaker. In her earliest film, Saute ma ville, a simultaneously joyous and suicidal short, Akerman shows a nuanced understanding of the precarious relationship between order and disorder, as well as a penchant for using food as a narrative device. Before blowing herself up, Akerman devours a plate of spaghetti with manic ferocity. She also eats an apple and sets the kettle to boil, though she never makes tea.

These commonplace actions, trivial as they may seem, establish the leitmotifs that appear in the rest of Akerman's oeuvre-eating, not eating, preparing food, and refusing it all come to signal displaced sexual desires and internal disturbances within her characters. Whether depicting an anemic sexual appetite with a single pea, as in Les rendez-vous d'Anna, or a psychic break with burnt potatoes, as in Jeanne Dielman, by fixing the camera's gaze on the mundane, often discarded tasks of food preparation and consumption, Akerman infuses ordinary gastronomical images with social and emotional significance. Here, food is not only a source of nourishment and preservation, but also an embodiment of desire, control, and their lack.

After Akerman's death on October 5, 2015, her longtime cinematographer Babette Mangolte introduced the newly restored Jeanne Dielman at the Museum of Modern Art by noting that, more than ever, Akerman's early films are reaching new audiences. In part this is because of the films' relatively recent availability through the Criterion Collection's Eclipse series and Hulu. But it is also because Akerman's films offer an insight into the loneliness and quiet beauty that comes from physical isolation in a time when society increasingly tends to replace the fleshy body with the social avatar and actual, physical community with an image of it. Akerman's films are deeply corporeal, and in that, they belong to a cinema that seems to be slipping further and further away.

JEANNE Dielman tells the story of a highly disciplined widow, who we watch, over the course of three days, cook, turn tricks, and take care of her son. Eventually Jeanne's regimented routine is disrupted, and to restore it, she murders a client. Much of the 201-minutefilm was shot in real-time; its detailed establishment and slow unraveling of Jeanne's routine builds a desire for denouement. Mirroring Jeanne's restraint, Akerman and Mangolte fixed the camera's gaze in each shot. No close-ups, no reverse shots (simply because, as Mangolte argued, they aren't needed), no pans, no zooms. Aside from two in-place jump cuts to indicate the transition from day into night during Jeanne's sex work, there are no trick edits. Akerman said of the decision to allow for Jeanne to complete her actions within the frame before cutting: "It was the only way to shoot that film-to avoid cutting the woman into a hundred pieces, to avoid cutting the action in a hundred places, to look carefully and to be respectful. The framing was meant to respect her, and her gestures within it."

Unflinching and uncanny, Akerman's stationary camera sets the viewer at unease. Akerman and Mangolte initially used variations of this technique in Hotel Monterey, the first film that they shot together, and then in La chambre, filmed the day after completing Monterey. After moving to New York in 1971, at the age of 20, Akerman became friends with Mangolte, who introduced her to the work of avant-garde filmmaker Michael Snow. Akerman was deeply taken by the way Snow, rather than relying on narrative and linear plot, used space and oscillating tracking shots to create suspense and emotion, particularly in his film Back and Forth. After Hotel Monterey, a wordless film that speaks to the beauty of stillness inside a desolate hotel, Akerman and Mangolte replicated Snow's back and forth tracking shots for La chambre, completing a 360-degree pan around Akerman's New York apartment, revealing dishes and chairs and Akerman on her bed, staring into the camera, defiant. Eventually, the camera reverses its motion to and away from Akerman in her sea of blankets, now seen chomping on an apple.

While the constantly panning camera of La chambre builds suspense, the stationary camera and frame of Jeanne Dielman creates a world of utter consistency. Within the first 15 minutes of the film, we see Jeanne has dialed and locked her routine to the second. The film opens on Jeanne setting a pot to boil on the stove. The bell rings, but she doesn't startle. Cut to the entryway. Jeanne stands, decapitated by the frame, arms extended to take her guest's outerwear. They walk down the hallway to the bedroom and shut the door behind them.

Jump cut. It's dark. Jeanne and the guest emerge and, after a slightly awkward moment, her "guest," a client, hands her money and says that he will see her next week. Fastidiously turning lights on and off as she goes, Jeanne moves to the dining room, deposits the money into a soup tureen, then goes into the kitchen, switches off the stove, and drains her perfectly cooked potatoes. Without pause, she continues her routine until her son arrives, right on schedule, just after she has set the table.

Jeanne's steady progression through the rest of day one and the morning of day two reveals the rigidity of her routine. By planning every single gesture, she protects herself against any unwanted anxiety that could seep in and erase the carefully constructed divisions in her life. Her rituals keep her life together by breaking it into cordoned fragments: motherhood, cooking, and sex work. Before meeting her clients, Jeanne washes and dries her hands completely, which cleanses her of cooking residue and, symbolically, her duty as caretaker. After she is done with a client, she deposits the money in the soup tureen before taking a bath, a sort of baptism, ridding the money of impurities. Jeanne gives money to her son directly from the soup tureen, never from her purse. By keeping these distinctions tidy, Jeanne maintains a sense of clean, guiltless power.

This changes when Jeanne emerges from her room with her client on day two. From the moment she walks out, she breaks her routine: she forgets to turn on the light in the entryway before handing her client his coat. She places her money in the soup tureen and forgets to replace the lid. By the time she reaches the kitchen, the potatoes have burned.

While peeling the new potatoes, her eyes drift closed and her hands slow to a drag, but she never stops. Despite significant delays to the evening's ceremonial routine, she refuses to discard any ritual, displacing power onto the objects of her obsession rather than onto herself.

The next morning, Jeanne's anxiety proves to be too much. Ahead of herself, Jeanne manages to skip a button on her nightgown, drop the shoe polish brush, arrive early to the post office and the grocery store, and ends up with an extra hour to kill-a first. Perhaps in the most telling scene, Jeanne tries to hurry the water through the hourglass neck of her pour-over coffee filter in an attempt, as Ivone Margulies points out in Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman's Hyperrealist Everyday, to push time along. Later, in a testament to her diminishing control, she prepares meatloaf, passing it through her hands for a full three and a half minutes-an eternity on film.

In the film's penultimate scene, the viewer realizes what happened to disrupt Jeanne's routine the night before, as it happens again for the camera. Jeanne has an orgasm and succumbs to pleasure-notably, though, for less time than it takes to make coffee. Positioned in front of the mirror so that both Jeanne's reflection and her client are within frame, the camera watches the aftermath. Jeanne dresses, spots her scissors out of the corner of her eye, leaves the frame, re-enters, and plunges the scissors into the neck of her client.

ON the surface, scripting a film, like putting a recipe to paper or choreographing an airtight routine, writes out anxiety. However, lingering at the edge of Akerman's meticulous script and Jeanne's daily menus is a sense of dread that something can nevertheless seep in to raze the façade of impenetrability.

Akerman's emotional relationship to food began early. As a child, her mother, an Auschwitz survivor, scolded her for not eating. Born into a poor family in postwar Brussels in 1950, Akerman recalls not wanting to eat because she did not want to be a burden. Instead, she ate her hunger, refusing to "reveal anything on the surface." In an interview with Lola Journal, Akerman recounts, "As a teenager, I ate voraciously-which bothered my father, since you had to keep skinny to get married." This tying of food to duty and societal expectations echoes throughout Jeanne Dielman.

Despite Jeanne's best efforts to maintain a routine, appetite and hunger control the plot. Appetite, unlike hunger, is never fully resolved but sustained in harmonic suspension from the end of one meal into the anticipation of the next, unless either rejected or displaced. Like a conductor of a great Wagnerian epic, Jeanne paces her meals to bring hunger in right on cue the same time each day, with no room for improvisation, snacks, or any other sort of indulgence.

Indeed, there are no brightly colored treats or deliciously ornate costumes in the film to whet the eye, only meals that are exactly enough and real-time fragments of gastronomical events that, like watching a friend eat when you don't have a plate, slowly build the viewer's hunger. Jeanne's sexual appetite, too, as mirrored in her abstemious food rituals, is purely economical, "merely a detail," as she calls it. When the orgasm occurs despite Jeanne's precautions, her orchestration slips.

To purge herself of her overabundance, Jeanne hurls her desire. Nausea, the violent undoing of appetite, manifests itself in Jeanne's overcooked potatoes. Her absurd shuffling from kitchen to bathroom with the potatoes invokes Bakhtin's grotesque body, overflowing and transcending its own limits, until she has eliminated them. Here, in retching, the metaphorical connection between Jeanne's internal and external worlds becomes tactile.

A new Eve, fallen into what she herself has defined as forbidden territory, she takes her innately soiled apple, the burned pomme de terre, and peels away the skin, ridding it of its dirt and, symbolically, of her trespass against her rigid set of commandments. Of harder flesh than the red apple that tempts Eve but with the same sinister undertones as the apple in Snow White, the raw potato contains solanine, a poisonous glycoalkaloid, which when ingested can be toxic.

Always present inside the seemingly inane imagery of the domestic is a murderous violence: The cook's ability to create comes directly from an ability to destroy. Though we witness no blood, we see Jeanne prepare butchered meat twice.

When Jeanne stabs her client, she completes the hunger cadence series that she controls throughout the film and brings her appetite to a resolution, indicating both a release for Jeanne-from her routine, her asceticism, her appetites-and for the viewer. As Jeanne sits at the dining room table with blood on her shirt, we see for the first time the violence of the everyday externalized.

It's important to note that Jeanne Dielman is not a condemnation of Jeanne or her prostitution but rather a staging of the brutality present in everyday banality. Jeanne Dielman is indeed violent but not because it shows murder or madness. Rather, it is violent because it fills the screen with the coded mundane, forcing the viewer to consider what may go unsaid, hidden in the most organic components of the quotidian routine.

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WHEN Chantal Akerman's hyperrealist homage to ritualistic domesticity, Jeanne Dielman 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 1975, Akerman settled down in the back of the room and observed the crowd. As the film progressed, a stream of audience members left, their chairs echoing their dismissals with loud smacks.

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researching Chantal Ackerman's hyperrealism

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Found this a poignant, moving, uncomfortable and tender portrayal by Ackerman of her mother. Fortunate to catch it in Nottingham at the weekend...

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No Home Movie, Chantal Akerman's final film, is both a veering departure from the trajectory of her recent work and completely of a piece with what had come before. Where her last feature, Almayer's Folly (2011), was a comparatively lavish period adaptation of Joseph Conrad's first novel, No Home Movie is a one-woman-band production, largely made up of semi-surreptitiously filmed vignettes that Akerman 'composed' by setting down a digital camera on whatever flat surface was available in one corner or another of her mother's Brussels flat - one shot prominently features the power cord in the foreground - and letting it record.

Belgium/France 2015
115 mins appox

Director Chantal Akerman

Distributor Contemporary Films in association with A Nos Amours
ica.org.uk/whats-on/no-home-movie
► Trailer

The mother, who died in 2014 at the age of 86, is Natalia 'Nelly' Akerman, usually referred to simply as 'Maman'. It is no exaggeration to say that Akerman's relationship with Maman, a Polish-born survivor of Auschwitz, was one of the through-lines of her work. Maman is the correspondent whose epistolary enquiries narrate News from Home (1976); and Akerman has called her nearly three-and-a-half-hour domestic opus Jeanne Dielman 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), the feature that catapulted her into festival-circuit celebrity at the age of 25, "a love-film for my mother". (When, at the kitchen table, mother and daughter discuss the relative merits of potatoes served with and without skins in No Home Movie, you can almost see the potato peeler in Delphine Seyrig's dishpan hands.) Writing about Akerman's mid-70s output, Brenda Longfellow noted: "Desire in these films circulates around the maternal body, around the variable presence and absence of the mother, around the enduring gaze of the daughter at the mother."

No Home Movie concludes with the final and irrevocable absence of Maman, and is throughout intimately concerned with the movements of women within circumscribed domestic spaces. In other words, it shows Akerman's particular set of preoccupations and obsessions very much intact, but finds her adopting new modes and forms in order to explore them. It appears casual, off-the-cuff, something cobbled together from little digital keepsakes, though the 20:1 shooting ratio that Akerman talked about in an interview before the movie's premiere at last year's Locarno film festival betrays the exhaustive process through which it finally achieved its apparently slack shape. I'm put in mind of Pauline Kael's aside in reviewing Jean Eustache's The Mother and the Whore (1973): "It took three months of editing to make this film seem unedited."

Akerman, an eternally truculent artist who didn't suffer fools lightly, has put an instructional warning right in the film's title, which might implicitly be read (This Is) No Home Movie. There's also a double meaning here, for the interstitial views of desert landscapes in Israel, taken with a BlackBerry camera, evoke the myth of the eternal Wandering Jew - the title might also be taken as Homeless Movie. In the Skype conversations between Akerman and Maman - Akerman announces that she is in Oklahoma or New York, though we don't see any view more exotic than that of a laptop and a pack of American Spirits in a nondescript room with the blinds pulled down - we get a glimpse into the life of the peripatetic film artist whose touchstones always remain Brussels and Maman. Over lunch, Maman speaks of her own very different uprooting: her flight from Poland to Belgium to escape the Nazis. This was all in vain, for Natalia was sent to Auschwitz, where her family perished, though this is spoken of only in a conversation between Akerman and Maman's carer, who seems only vaguely aware of the significance of the Holocaust. (Aren't we all, though?)

No Home Movie distils the essence of an intimate relationship picked up between stopovers, passing over months in a matter of seconds. For approximately two-thirds of the film, Maman appears sharp, lively, healthy, even though she's still recovering from a recent spill; Akerman chastises her for eating too little, part of the game of playful chiding that goes on between them. Then, seemingly all at once, Maman takes a turn. Visiting, Akerman finds her rattled by a phlegmy cough and growing lethargic; Chantal and younger sister Sylviane take turns trying to draw Maman back into the world, perhaps not realising the severity of the situation. While previous visits all seem to take place in a grey Belgian autumn, which fills the apartment with soft, diffuse light, in the final stretch of the film it is bright and clear outside, and the interior is largely seen in silhouette - which is not to suggest that Akerman bent the weather to suit her mise en scène but that a combination of happenstance, intuition and editing choices creates a total tonal shift in the concluding chapters.

In the Brussels sequences, Akerman alternates between fixed set-ups and handheld work. In the former shots, several of which Akerman appears in, she is always acutely aware of the frame, ceding pride of place to her mother, keeping her own back to the camera. When doing handheld work, she achieves a surreptitious, snooping quality - we never cease entirely to be children in the company of our parents, and Akerman gives a sense of crossing the carpet on tippy-toes so as not to break the silence. Aside from a glimpse of what is presumably a local park, the only exteriors in Brussels are taken looking from Maman's balcony on to a green lawn below, these shots recurring as a refrain and a sort of counterpoint to the inhospitable desert images.

Akerman acts as her own cinematographer here (as she did on her documentaries From the Other Side in 2002 and Là-bas in 2006), and it's impossible to imagine achieving the desired level of easy intimacy had there been an interceding presence in the mix. Akerman doesn't try to erase the presence of the camera, though, making sure to include a moment during one of the Skype chats where Maman seems to hold her tongue because she's being recorded, protesting, "I don't want everyone to hear what I want to say to you."

It's pure speculation to guess at Akerman's mindset when editing No Home Movie, but this moment strikes me as the very sort of thing one reproaches oneself for after the death of a parent, moments that can in retrospect seem like failures of communication at what might have been a crucial point, just as some secret that one will never again have access to is on the verge of being revealed. When I saw No Home Movie at its Locarno press screening last summer, my own mother's death was less than a month behind me, which may go some way to explaining why the film moved me more than it did the tiny handful of superannuated hangers-on who saw fit to boo when the credits rolled.

It's not hard to imagine having a hostile reaction to this piece of work, so convincing is it in giving the impression of being tossed off that anyone not paying attention might overlook its calm control and the deep core of pain that it keeps hidden in plain sight. The film's mixed reception has been given as an 'explanation' for Akerman's suicide only a couple of months later, though this does a grave disservice to a woman who, for all her confessed difficulties with anxiety and depression - "I'm in a good mood," she says in one of the Skype chats. "Let's enjoy it, it's not that common" - was nothing short of an iron-clad hard-ass when conducting herself as an artist. I'd been due to interview her, but was told she was unhappy with the interviews she'd done that day and would have to reschedule. We agreed a later date - the morning of 5 October.

I wonder if I'd have had the nerve to bring up my own mother. I wonder too what the fate of this queer, fragile, personal film would have been in the cold world had it not had the marketing hook of a tragedy to sell it. Now Akerman is being celebrated and her filmography is decorating tote bags and No Home Movie is getting the distribution it always deserved, though that core of pain is rather more evident now. It's tempting to look at Akerman's suicide in the light of Eustache's, 30-odd years before - the case of completely dedicated personal filmmakers who drew their material from their own lives, and lost contact with their source or, if you prefer, with home. Akerman managed one last trip back - her final loss is our loss, her final victory ours too.

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Film of the week: No Home Movie | Sight & Sound

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No Home Movie, Chantal Akerman's final film, is both a veering departure from the trajectory of her recent work and completely of a piece with what had come before.