‘To be a feminist mother continues to mean temporarily losing one’s soul connection to one’s work and one’s self in order to give love and care to the new other. For some feminist mothers, this also mean allowing one’s self to become completely absorbed by the mystery and inexplicable joy that the infant brings. Sometimes these desires merge: passion for one’s baby or one’s child(ren) opens up new perspectives and forms of being and living. Oftentimes the mother’s desires collide with her artist self’. (Liss 2009)
At 24 weeks pregnant I waded, bump in toe, into a feeding ground for artists. The art exhibition was the first I had attended since the discovery of my little sprog and the first time I was faced with many former tutors and peers. I wore a sheer white dress that loosely draped over my swollen breasts and huge (in hindsight I didn’t know the meaning of huge at this point) bulge, attempting to retain some of my feminine style and elegance. I was greeted by swooning friends and delighted rubs of the belly, although deep down I imagined everyone was thinking the same, she could have been a good artist, what a waste. I was weighed down by my identity as a mother, sentenced by the institution to live out my days selflessly, suffocating what was left of my former artist self. Ultimately, I felt embarrassed.
Perhaps this was a hormonal overreaction, but this accusation didn’t arrive from nowhere. It stems from the repressed image of the maternal in contemporary art. Cultural stereotypes show the image of the mother as all-nurturing, all-forgiving, all-sacrificing, whilst the image of the artist represents all-powerful, all-dominant, all-successful (wo)man. So how can you possibly be both? In his 1938 novel Enemies of Promise Cyril Connolly proclaimed that ‘there is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall’. An infamous quote that has no doubt resonated deeply within contemporary culture and so despite feminist activism in the 1960’s, motherhood still remains relatively uncharted territory. With the emergence of shared parental leave and abundance of child care options and working mothers, institutions may be forced to accept the presence of artist-mothers, but we are still a long way off equality. What is the point of artist-mothers acceptance if our work is still considered second class. Must we omit our child(ren), or any essence of motherhood, from our work in order to succeed? Why is drawing from the complex experiences of motherhood seen as cliche? Irrefutably work which challenges the pre-conceived image of the mother should be celebrated.
For a short while I fell out of love with art and the institutions which control it for making me feel that way about the daughter I adored so much.
The institutionalised perception of the mother is continuing to thwart artists from having children, stealing their most fertile years. Through acknowledgement of this and emergence of the feminist mother that Liss refers to as, ‘the one that can be nurturing, caring, loving and sacrificing but not at the expense of losing ourselves’ can we not argue for a transformation from the separation of artist and mother. I’m a mother, but I’m also an artist, a photographer, a researcher and a writer. I can be powerful (god, every woman who gives birth is powerful!), nurturing, dominant, forgiving and I accept that the mother in me often collides with the artist in me. Being a mother is an endless labour and it is ok to want to give yourself wholly to your child but, and to refer (for the last time) back to Liss: ‘What distinguishes the feminist mother from the patriarchal model of the mother is that the feminist mother struggles to break the yoke of centuries of expectation’.
Nesting 