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.