high gabble

Last November my parents moved to sheltered accommodation near me in Farnham leaving the family home in Chigwell, Essex after 35 years. Two weeks after moving my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer and spent several months on a psychiatric ward before having a ‘successful’ mastectomy in February 2008 and then returning to the psychiatric ward. She was discharged at the beginning of this month. She and my father are now beginning to think about selling the family home. I am taking cameras to the house in early June to photograph and film what remains. I am not sure what will emerge from this undertaking but the working title of the work ‘High Gabble’ - courtesy of my dear Auntie Renee now deceased - is a play on the name of the house, ‘High Gable’, and is a pretty accurate reflection on my mother’s highly emotional mood swings throughout my own childhood.

There is much is the media about a deficit of funds to care for the growing elderly population. There is much in the media about a deficit of funds to treat the mentally ill. This work will hopefully engage in a thoughtful way with these debates.

some photographs

Margaret Salmon

Continuing on with my research into other artists, I am also interested to discover more about the filmmaker Margaret Salmon who won last years MaxMara women-only art prize having just become a mother. The prize funded her proposal to make a trilogy of films in Italy around the theme of the lullaby. I understand this work is now complete and that her husband and baby were able to travel with her. It was shown at the Whitechapel Gallery at the beginning of this year and unfortunately missed it but apparently she filmed three very tired new mothers. Writing in the Evening Standard, Nick Haworth says ‘Each film presents a day in the life of an Italian mother. A softly sung Florentine lullaby, Ninna Nanna Fiorentina, provides their soothing and melancholy soundtrack. This gently depressive element pervades the work as the women spend much of the day in the dark, sunlight creeping in only through gaps in curtains. Two of them wear only nightclothes, surrendering every personal concern to the rhythms of childcare. Though in constant contact with their babies, they are shown here isolated and alone. It's hard not to feel a kind of pity for this rawly instinctive love that is not always reciprocated.'

Catherine Elwes

In the 80s video artist Catherine Elwes made work such as There Is A Myth (about breastfeeding her son) and First House (the 3 year old distracts the mother from what she is doing by tapping on the window). Elwes suggested this work was not just autobiographical and placed it in the context of her previous feminist artwork. Likewise, I used last year’s seminar to think through the relationship between my current practice and my pre-children work as a photographer of the male body and as a feminist against censorship. Making this connection was important for me to have conviction in my current practice. Elwes has also suggested that domestically based installation work is an effect of feminism’s breaking down the barriers between personal and public. I also noted that she suggested that the need of women artists to do this could be a response to the disillusionment or powerlessness to affect wider public politics outside the home (lack of time to be effective!) and I recognise this as a possible motivation within my own practice.

equal ops for mums at work

Just doing an e-learning module on Diversity in the Workplace which links to this:
http://lifeandhealth.guardian.co.uk/family/story/0,,2259070,00.html

It seems that we face in-built discrimination at interviews, never mind facing up to the emotional push and pull that takes place between employer and family once we get the job. I suppose I can see the pitfalls for small companies - perhaps they need more government support.

sorting out the camping kit

That's what we have been doing this weekend. Airing out smelly sleeping bags, buying a new chairs, table and other bits and pieces. Ordered a fan heater! Off to Mother Ivey's, Cornwall next Saturday. Just checked the long range weather forecast. Looks like a real mixture of possibilities. Please - let's hope we have a good fun, relaxing week!

Sally Mann

To date, I think the artist with whom I draw the most parallels would be Sally Mann. The discussion around her work has mostly concerned pornography, photography and representations of children. My images are not as overtly sexual as many of hers, but I do not steer away from this area deliberately. Jane Fletcher’s paper Uncanny Resemblances provides a useful analysis of Mann’s work through Cixous’ notion of a blurring of the boundaries between binary oppositions that prop up patriarchal society and suggests that Mann’s pictures allow the co-existence of what is traditionally considered diametrically opposed. She analyses three of Mann’s photographs, The Wet Bed, Fallen Child and Virginia in the Sun in these terms and concludes by considering Mann’s role as a mother and photographer, and photography’s relation to the ‘real’. I do not propose to recount Fletcher’s analysis here, but here are some of her comments about the work that interested me:

‘Through every day events which every mother has seen, the photographs provoke a feeling of strangeness, a ‘dread and horror’ which is elusive but insistent. ‘

‘It is disconcerting because of the contradictory states of childish innocence and adult sexuality that it simultaneously points to.’

‘It is tender and terrible simultaneously. The familiar becomes unnervingly unfamiliar.’

‘Mann expresses the contradictions that are inherited from a romantic myth that positions children as sexless and childhood as eternal. In doing so, she reveals and perpetuates simultaneously a crisis in how we depict and consume pictures of children.’

‘It is no coincidence that Mann, as one who moves across a set of prescribed opposites herself artist/creator versus mother/procreator – should engage with the contradictions of childhood that her children exhibit. Nor, unfortunately, is it a surprise that critics accused her of bad-mothering in a final attempt to discredit her troubling images. If we acknowledge that the distinction made between photographer and mother is not in actuality clear cut belongs, instead, to a specific system of binary thought, Immediate Family once again subverts an ideal; the ideal of motherhood.’

‘Immediate Family ‘violates’ sentimentalised images of childhood and also dispels notions of the mother as secondary to the child: secondary and silenced. Mann is an ambitious practitioner and a proud mother… To mother and to photograph cease to be two distinct occupations; they sustain one another. In doing so, they upset our cherished ideas about what motherhood and childhood should entail.’

Finally: ‘Photography’s relation to the real has always been disputed. Linked to its referent like a child is linked to its mother, the photograph is both truth and not truth, reality and representation.’

Assessments and Research

I'm on campus at UCCA every day this week. Two days of first year assessments and three days of third year assessments. I love this time of year - it's like going to a film festival for a whole week! It's great to see that most of the students that I taught two years ago have matured and produced some outstanding films, interactive artwork, multiscreen installations and so on as their graduation work. There are definitely some undergraduates to watch over the next couple of years too. Next week will be formal marking and feedback.

This busy work schedule has meant calling on favours from friends to look after the children. We will reward ourselves with some 'family time' at half term when we go camping in Cornwall - let's hope we have good weather. After the external examiners have reported and the Progression Board is over, then hopefully I will get a few weeks research leave. I have already booked out a high definition video camera with a view to making some work at my parents house which will probably have to be sold sometime soon.

Last Wednesday I took my mum to buy a bra after her recent mastectomy. On May 21st, my birthday, I am taking her to be fitted with a prosthesis. The date of the appointment is somewhat ironic. The breast that nurtured me at birth is to be replaced by a false one on the same day 48 years on...

Sacrificial Motherhood?

I discovered a current research project being undertaken at the University of Brighton by Annie (Hsiao-Ching) Wang. The title of her investigation is The Creativity of Motherhood: Self-Representation over a Time of Growth in Contemporary Taiwan. Her project is more focussed on self portraiture than my own work. She suggests that self-representation is the most important element in announcing the self-determination of the mother to inhabit the world of images. She says ‘By doing so, I attempt to challenge the great number of stereotypical images of the selfless mother.’ Three of her five research questions are again about self-representation: how do I use self-representation to express my own experience of motherhood? What are the conventional codes of representation used to depict motherhood in visual art? How do contemporary women artists use self-representation to represent their motherhood? It seems that Wang’s project, then, is quite different to my own – not only because she is interested in contradicting the stereotypes in her own Taiwanese society – but also because it seems that she proposes to make images of herself as mother in order to counter the stereotype of sacrificial motherhood.

Having said this, sacrificial motherhood is my reality. Putting my needs first is very rarely possible. My existence is pretty much determined by the needs of others - not just children, but partner, parents, friends, employers, students – the list goes on. As an artist I am driven to document this in order to survive it and I strive to make sense of it in my work. I have to negotiate with my family for it to be possible for me to make any artwork at all. By definition the work has to be made by intuition, impulse and expediency. As I write this my daughter wakes up and I have to stop!! See what I mean? My practice has to reflect this by being fluid and flexible. A neat and well articulated methodology may firstly set me up to fail the objectives and secondly stifle creative outcomes. That is my fear.