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.’