Live Art and Motherhood: A Study Room Guide on Live Art and the Maternal (original) (raw)
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Maternal art practice: emerging field of artistic enquiry into motherhood, care and time
The Maternal in Creative Work Intergenerational Discussions on Motherhood and Art, 1st Edition, 2019
This edited collection explores, challenges and critiques various modes and forms of art practice which deal with the maternal. We invited artists, theorists and cultural workers to discuss their approach to what Sarah Ruddick (1989) calls ‘maternal thinking’, a unity of refl ection, judgment and emotion about motherhood. The collection also addresses what Ruddick has always contested, that there is a profound need for sustained political and intellectual effort before maternal thinking can be heard and acknowledged in the public domain. So, ultimately, this edited collection seeks to understand how art allows practitioners to reimagine the processes that solidify the mother as metaphor and trope in culture. Maternal art practice is an encompassing term that I use to describe a set of art practices which explore, reflect and critique the dominant cultural notion of motherhood and the role of ‘the mother’ in contemporary art practice. I believe that maternal art practice is opening up new territories where artists can productively contribute to a wider set of political and philosophical discussions on care, labour and time.
Maternal Mattering: The Performance and Politics of the Maternal in Contemporary Art
A Companion to Feminist Art, 2019
This chapter discusses the work of contemporary US-born or -based artists that work with the maternal not as content but, more potently, as form, and situates these artists inter-generationally. It provides some of the different ways contemporary artists are working with the maternal. This small and localized selection helps the author to underscore the way that while the maternal functions as content, it also, through the mobilizing of maternal relation, affect, and labor, emerges as form. With their focus on activities such as insemination, birthing, nursing, and childcare, the artists suggest alternate ways of interrogating the daily practice of the maternal, working to undo, to rework, and to render uninhabitable the figure of the maternal as a phallogocentric identity tied to specifically coded affects, performances, and ideals. Adding to the political invitations proffered by the works, Herrera Silva offers us the maternal not as an endless font of plenitude but as a finite, responsive relation.
Mother Making: Artistic Practice and the Formation of a Mother
My artistic practice focuses on the lived experience of motherhood as the primary point of departure. This text details my decision making process in the creation and display of the artwork included in my Master of Fine Arts Thesis Exhibit, A Bringing Forth, at George Mason University in March 2016. I recount the ways my studio practice was formed specifically by the experience of pregnancy, birth and caretaking and the ways in which the practice has enabled and supported these experiences. A Bringing Forth included drawings, paintings, sculptures, video art and an annotated prose poem created as auto-ethnographic work focusing on acts of care performed during my daughter’s first year. The social, cultural, economic, and biological circumstances that influenced this personal experience and the ways these concepts are represented through the art objects and exhibition decisions are detailed in this article.
The Central, Yet Invisible, Labor of Motherhood in Art
Hyperallergic, 2020
A review of the edited volume "Inappropriate Bodies: Art, Design, and Maternity," edited by Rachel Epp Buller and Charles Reeve. https://hyperallergic.com/562684/inappropriate-bodies-art-design-and-maternity/
Contemporary Mamactivist Artists: A Forum on Maternal Activist Art
Studies in the Maternal Special Issue on The Everyday Maternal Practice: Activist Structures in Creative Work, 2016
This special forum for Studies in the Maternal asks fourteen activist- mother-artists, or “mamactivists”, to respond to the following questions: (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 work to this last work? and (5) Why is the maternal, in your opinion, important to activist, engaged, political art today? Responses highlight a range of geographic and cultural perspectives, as well as artistic strategies. One commonality between them is that they take the maternal not as a biological facticity, but a rich feminist site of political intervention.
"The Vision of the Artist/Mother: The Strange Creativity of Painting and Pregnancy"
Coming to Life: Philosophies of Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Mothering (Eds. Lachance Adams & Lundquist), 2012
Book Abstract: "Coming to Life" does what too few scholarly works have dared to attempt: It takes seriously the philosophical significance of women's lived experience. Every woman, regardless of her own reproductive story, is touched by the beliefs and norms governing discourses about pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering. The volume's contributors engage in sustained reflection on women's experiences and on the beliefs, customs, and political institutions by which they are informed. They think beyond the traditional pro-choice/pro-life dichotomy, speak to the manifold nature of mothering by considering the experiences of adoptive mothers and birthmothers, and upend the belief that childrearing practices must be uniform, despite psychosexual differences in children. Many chapters reveal the radical shortcomings of conventional philosophical wisdom by placing trenchant assumptions about subjectivity, gender, power and virtue in dialogue with women's experience.
This feminist research has its aim to analyze the balance of gender roles of contemporary female artists who become mothers and start combining art making and maternal practices. Using methods of in-depth interviews and observations we study how women are inscribed into gender institute of motherhood, and how they find the possibilities to resolve the conflict of roles. In our focus - professional artistic practices of a female artist after childbirth, their co-existence with practices of intensive-extended mothering as well as problematization of gender role balance – of the mother and the artist. Its successful combination directly influences future careers of female Artist and her sustainability in the arts in general. Key words: intensive-extended mothering, artist-mother’s balance of gender roles, sociology of art, feminism, cultural production
Performing Everyday Maternal Practice: Activist Structures in Creative Work.
2016
There is a gradual, yet sustained increase in creative practices, which explore maternal everyday experience in various mediums and formats. In this article, I am focusing on a contemporary trend of innovative performative strategies explored by creative practitioners in order to stage the spheres of maternal invisibility. This trend is in a intergenerational dialogue with artwork created almost four decades ago, as an early response to female objectification by art institutions. Current artistic consciousness-raising maternal projects similarly share personal experiences within a more public space, to provide focus on personal and social injustice.