Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood

A year after her first child was born, the American artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles (b.1939) published ‘Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969! Proposal for an exhibition “Care”’. The three-and-a-half-page document made a case for domestic work to be made not just visible but also to be valued as an art form. She later described it as ‘a survival strategy’, as a way of reconciling the conflict between her work as a mother and her work as an artist.¹ But it also set out to challenge a culture that valued progress and ‘utter development’ over the slow, repetitive, messy realities of care work.² Over fifty years later, Hettie Judah, the curator of the touring exhibition Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood, suggests that very little has changed. Care work – specifically the care of children, which continues to fall in the most part to women – remains undervalued and underrepresented in the art world.³ This is not for a lack of material; the exhibition, which includes the work of more than sixty modern and contemporary artists, shows that artist mothers have been making innovative and complex work for decades. Each draws on their lived experience to raise issues with much wider social and cultural implications around the body and inequality, isolation and dependency, and one’s sense of economic and self-worth.

At the Midlands Arts Centre, Birmingham, the opening section, ‘The Kitchen’, features archival material and the work of feminist artists from the 1960s and 1980s, including Ukeles’s manifesto. This introduces some of the themes that the exhibition covers, while also outlining the extent to which motherhood is invisible in Western art and culture.⁴ As Judah writes in her accompanying book, ‘It seems to me that the same works are made over and over again because part of our art history remains unwritten’.⁵ Among the exhibits is documentation of the feminist collective Mother Art, who, like Ukeles, sought to interrogate conventional ideas about what constitutes art, where it should be displayed and who can engage with it. In 1977 Mother Art staged a series of performances in launderettes, each lasting the length of a single wash or dry cycle. Laundry Works not only addressed one of the key challenges for mother artists – namely the conflict between household and creative work and a lack of time for artistic production – but also showed that domestic spaces had the potential to function as sites for avant-garde experimentation. After Proposition 13 was passed in California in 1978, the Arts Council came under attack for wasteful public spending, and Laundry Works was targeted in particular. In response, the collective performed a clean-up of what they perceived to be the real sources of waste: the banks and City Hall of Los Angeles. 

Upstairs, in a section titled ‘Maintenance’, artists continue to make a point of airing their dirty laundry. In Die Geburtenmadonna (The Birth Madonna) FIG.1, VALIE EXPORT (b.1940) sits with her legs open on top of a washing machine, from which bloodied towels spill out. One in a series that subverts Renaissance representations of the Virgin Mary, the work references Michelangelo’s dramatic and sorrowful Pietà (1498–99; St Peter’s Basilica, Vatican City), in which Mary holds her son’s limp body after it has been taken down from the cross. Die Geburtenmadonna, by contrast, does not feature a baby, but rather the aftermath of childbirth: the washing machine, a symbol of modern consumerism, but also of the toil of motherhood and the social expectation to cleanse and purify the experience. Close by is Underground FIG.2, an installation of eight portraits drawn by Marlene Dumas (b.1953) in black and white, which were then embellished with colour by her daughter, who at the time was six years old. Although the idea of the artist working alongside her daughter seems romantic, the results reveal a more fraught and wearing process – one that has the potential to distort and damage as much as enhance. With bulging red eyes, bandages and painted cheeks, the faces appear manic and ghoulish, part pageant contestant, part wounded soldier.

In the section ‘Creation’, Ten Months FIG.3 by Susan Hiller (1940–2019) positions images of her swollen belly – resembling the curve of a planet or a lunar landscape – alongside extracts from her diary, which is written in the third person, conveying a sense of distance that highlights the strangeness of growing a human inside one’s body. The first extract reads: ‘She dreams of paws, and of “carrying” a cat while others carry babies. Later, all the cats pay homage’. It is aptly placed alongside the unsettling Surrogate FIG.4 by Cathie Pilkington (b.1968). In this sculpture, a baby monkey clings on to a dummy ‘mother’ that resembles a character somewhere between Mickey Mouse and a haunted house mannequin. Made shortly after the artist gave birth, it was a response to encountering photographs of the psychologist Harry Harlow’s research into infant attachment. In his experiments monkeys were given two ‘mothers’ to choose from, one made of metal, the other covered in cloth; they always returned to the soft candidate. Although the study has often been cited as proof of the importance of physical affection in creating a bond between mother and baby, Pilkington’s sculpture draws attention to its brutality. It also emphasises the complex relationship between the total helplessness of a newborn and the disorientating experience of becoming a mother.

In ‘Loss’, brutality is explored in different ways: from the experience of longing for or losing a child to having the right to choose whether or not to have a child taken away. In Annonciation FIG.5, titled in reference to the biblical story of the Annunciation, Elina Brotherus (b.1972) documents her experiences of IVF in a series of portrait photographs. The artist appears seated with her legs tightly closed on the edge of a bath; dressed in black on a chair facing a wall; or naked and hunched on a sofa next to a pair of white trousers. ‘When the treatment is unsuccessful’, she writes in an accompanying text, ‘it’s not exaggerated to say it feels like mourning someone who died. The loss is very concrete. Not only does one lose a child, one also loses a whole future life as a family’.

It is testament to Judah’s sensitive handling of the subject-matter that the final section of the show – ‘The Temple’, a homage to the mother figure – acknowledges that absence, like invisibility, does not equate to lack. Jessa Fairbrother’s Role Play (Woman with Cushion) FIG.6 is a series of monochromatic photographs in which the artist ‘performs’ the stages of pregnancy with a cushion underneath her dress. She began the work following a series of unsuccessful fertility treatments, and returned to it after the death of her mother. The artist perforated and hand-painted patches of gold onto the photographs, suggesting the emergence of something new or an act of reparation.

Meanwhile, works by such artists as Renee Cox (b.1960) and Catherine Opie (b.1961) challenge the exclusionary perspectives of motherhood that continue to proliferate in contemporary culture. Cox’s series Yo Mama (1992–94) shows the artist, who was the first pregnant woman to attend the Whitney Independent Study Program in 1993, as various goddess-like, maternal figures. In the image included here FIG.7, her gaze is direct and she is naked except for a pair of high heels; her body is taut and poised for action as she holds her wriggling child firmly in her arms. Opie’s Self-Portrait/Nursing (2004) captures the artist breastfeeding her baby. On her chest the word ‘Pervert’ is spelt out in scar tissue, a spectral presence of her former life and work. In response to being asked about her transition from documenting the lesbian S&M scene to her intimate photographs of domestic life and motherhood, Opie has noted the irony of how becoming ‘homogenized and part of mainstream domesticity is transgressive for somebody like [her]’.⁶

The complex and often contradictory nature of pregnancy, birth and motherhood – the relationship between its intimacy and expansiveness and the brutal and restrictive implications on the body and self – runs throughout the exhibition. However, for all of the commonalities that the works share, what emerges most clearly is the diversity of experience. Although this may seem a self-evident point, it is significant that the exhibition not only challenges stereotypes that flatten, reduce and exclude any person who does not meet certain societal expectations, but also confronts the assumption that motherhood is too trivial a subject for serious art.