femadlib K

Alex Brew contacted me through the Exposures archive project at Goldsmiths. She is a member of a group of women artists who describe themselves as 'feminist activists'. Check out the links to some fabulous artists' work on their blog http://femadlibkolektiv.blogspot.com/ I recently screened two of my mid-90s films for their fundraising cafe and party. Unfortunately I couldn't get up to London for either of these events, but hope they were successful.

update on exposures archive

Good news! It seems that the Womens' Art Library at Goldsmiths are very interested in our archive material. We hope to meet in September when everyone returns from vacation. I think we should be able to get a really good collection of photographs, press cuttings and video together for them.  

exposures archive

A couple of months back I was looking through materials generated by the Women Photo Men and Men Review Women photo workshops that we used to run at Exposures after chatting to Steve Littman about future my research direction. There are many interesting photographs and the testimonials of participants are very poignant. I wondered whether there was any scope for a book or website to publish the material so it could be accessed by students or researchers interested in gender studies. Also there seems to be a resurgance of media interest in the definition of masculinity and the reluctance of some men to see their bodies as desirable.

To try to decide what to do with this material, I contacted dear friends and colleagues, Grace Lau and Robin Shaw, and they came to lunch yesterday. It was so lovely to see them. Nearly 5 years since I saw Grace and probably over 10 since Robin and I met up. After lots of catch up chat about our current projects and interests we started to look through the material. It is fairly certain that we would have a problem with releases if we tried to publish many of the images and it would be difficult to contact the models and participants since so much time has passed. None of us has the inclination or the time to take this on. We have decided to see whether the Womens' Library at London Metropolitan University or the Womens' Art Library at Goldsmiths would be interested in adding the materials to their collection.

birth rites

My colleague, Liz, has just given me a feature from the Guardian about this exhibition on childbirth. Need to explore more...

http://www.birthrites.org.uk/index.php?id=320

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.

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.’

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.

ron mueck

I was recently reading about Ron Mueck’s Mother and Child, one of his smaller, approx half life size sculptures, of a mother startled by the presence of her new born baby resting slimy on her stomach. Apparently the curator Colin Wiggins took his own mother to the exhibition and she stood in front of the sculpture speechless for a long time. Finally she said ‘Yes, that’s what it is like’. I would love the audience to react that way to my work. It is somewhat surprising that this work is by a male artist, but it seems certain that his mother-in-law, Paula Rego, has had an influence on his work. I am more interested in how motherhood could enhance the direction of women artists work. I am particularly excited when my audience recognise something in my work that is relevant to their experience of motherhood or childhood memory.