Live Art And Motherhood - Live Art Development Agency
Live Art and MotherhoodA Study Room Guide on Live Art and the MaternalCompiled & written by Emily Underwood-Lee andLena Šimić2016
LADA Study Room GuidesAs part of the continuous development of the Study Room we regularly commission artistsand thinkers to write personal Study Room Guides on specific themes.The idea is to help navigate Study Room users through the resource, enable them toexperience the materials in a new way and highlight materials that they may not haveotherwise come across.All Study Room Guides are available to view in our Study Room, or can be viewed and/ordownloaded directly from their Study Room catalogue entry.Please note that materials in the Study Room are continually being acquired and updated.For details of related titles acquired since the publication of this Guide search the onlineStudy Room catalogue with relevant keywords and use the advance search function tofurther search by category and date.Cover image credit: Fifteen Paces (traffic dependent), Maternity Leaves, 2013. Photo byLizzie Philps
1Table of contentsEmily Underwood-Lee and Lena ŠimićAn Incomplete and Completely Partial Rationalep.3Áine Phillipssex, birth & death / Eroticismp.7Anna FurseYerma’s Eggs / Subfertilityp.9Bean(m)other / the untitled / Queerp.11Clare QualmannPerambulator / Bordersp.13Elena MarchevskaValid until / Timep.15Emily Underwood-LeePatience / Griefp.17Grace SurmanI Love My Baby And My Baby Loves / Playp.19Helen SargeantM(other) Stories / Labourp.21Helena WalshIn Pursuit of Pleasure / Excessp.23Lena ŠimićMedea/Mothers’ Clothes / Belongingp.25Liz ClarkeI Tattooed My Baby / Conformityp.27Lizzie PhilpsMaternity Leaves / Resistancep.29MothersuckersBreastcups / Collaborationp.31
2Miffy RyanMy Nana’s Wedding (Gown) / Generationsp.33Tracy Evanscaesura / Erasurep.35Zoo IndigoUnder the Covers / Fantasyp.37Emily Underwood-Lee and Lena ŠimićAn Unfinished Responsep.39Study Room resources on artists featured in the Guidep.40Reading Listp.41
3An Incomplete and Completely Partial RationaleThis Study Room Guide on Live Art and Motherhood features fourteen individual artists andtwo artist collectives working in the mediums of Live Art and performance around the topicof the maternal. Motherhood and the maternal are difficult terms. There is an inherentessentialism and biology is often assumed. For us, motherhood refers to the livedexperience of mothering regardless of our route to it, whereas the maternal refers to thestudy of and representations of motherhood. All of the contributors in this volume aremothers but we hope this volume is of interest to both those who have cared for childrenand those who have not, after all, we all have direct experience of being m/othered. We areall first of all natals before we are mortals (thank you Hannah Arendt).This project is of its time, its generation, and its geographical location with its own set ofconnections and logic. It has been researched and written in 2015 and 2016. Many of theartists featured here came together through the research gathering Motherhood and LiveArt which was organised by Emily Underwood-Lee and Lena Šimić in January 2016 at theInstitute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home in Liverpool, part of the Study Room inExile series of events, in collaboration with the Live Art Development Agency.1 The artistswho were not present at that gathering yet are featured in this Study Room Guide havecome to our attention thanks to the women at the event and due to our own feministhistories. As authors of this Study Room Guide we raise our hands: we are guilty offavouritism and we are subjective. We admit that this is about personal connections,inspired conversations, common politics, solidarity, but also importantly, our own sense ofagency as artists and mothers.We (Emily and Lena) have worked together for a number of years sharing a commoninterest in autobiography and performance. Initially we met through the Women’s Writingfor Performance series of workshops at Lancaster University (2003 – 2006) and then, withfive other women performance practitioners, co-founded the Factory Floor network (2006 2016) for women solo performers and writers.2 Our energies and enthusiasm combinedagain under the common (practice as) research interest in ‘performance and the maternal’at the Motherhood and Creative Practice: Maternal Structures in Creative Workinternational conference at South Bank University in June 2015, organized by ElenaMarchevska and Valerie Walkerdine. This encounter activated our desire to research artistsworking on ‘maternal performance’. We were therefore delighted to be a part of A StudyRoom Gathering on Caring and Making, organised by Chloé Déchery and Mary Paterson,which took place at the Live Art Development Agency in July 2015. This gathering happenedin response to a large number of DIY 11: 2014 applications from artists who wanted todevise workshops around issues of care, dependents, parenthood/motherhood andchildren.We are not alone. The last few years have seen a proliferation of support networksdedicated to parents/artists. These include Artful Care, Mothers Who Make, Enemies of1Please see / for documentation of this event.Factory Floor was created in collaboration with Abi Lake, Caroline Wilson, Clare Duffy, Kerstin Bueschges andLouie Jenkins.2
4Good Art, Motherhood: A Social Practice, The Mums and Babies Ensemble, the Facebookgroup Artist/Mother Society, Parents in Performing Arts and internationally TheMothernists, Cultural ReProducers, Artist Parent Index, and M/Other Voices foundation, toname a few.It feels important to note all this past and present activity around the subject of arts andparenthood and position this Study Room Guide on Live Art and Motherhood as yet anotherincomplete attempt to map a somewhat disparate and disconnected but yet deeplyengaged artists’ community consisting of mothers working in the medium of Live Art. Whatis specific here? The artist/mothers featured in this guide have set out to make performanceand/or Live Art work about their particular maternal experience. All artist/motherstherefore engage with a specific set of methodologies of performance/Live Art making andinevitably develop a certain individual maternal performance aesthetic. This Study RoomGuide is about mapping the artists’ works and themes, creating an archive, and, on apragmatic as well as highly political level, giving visibility to this field and proclaimingmaternal agencies through and in arts making. Too often the mother has been invisible; asearch through the creative and academic archives reveals she is often second to her child,reduced to a screen on which to project the antipathy, reverence or hatred of the centralprotagonist: she is the source of his problems or oedipal anxieties. With this Study RoomGuide we wish to bring the mother centre stage, to celebrate the diversity of maternalperformance practice and artworks by mothers about mothering. This Study Room Guide ispart of our wider scholarly project; we wish to be part of the current movement to namematernal performance aesthetics and explore them deeper (please see our reading list atthe end of the guide).However, regardless of our common experience of identifying as mother/artists working inthe medium of Live Art, we are each different from one another. We are not a unifiedgroup, we do not represent an essential mother and we do not embark on our journeys tomotherhood through a common biological path. Instead we find unity and community in ourdifferent but related experiences as women who identify as mothers and artists. Our livedexperiences of class, race, sexuality, gender, age, religion, migration, dis/ability, financialstatus, (lack of) partnership, sense of recognition in our careers, in our communities, in ourcities and beyond, all matter and feed into our arts practice, into both outcomes andprocesses. Each artist has therefore been given a space for their own expression, taskedwith 300 words on a given topic, which is in dialogue with their arts practice. In inviting theartists to do their work in reflecting, naming and engaging with their practice, we have cometo imagine ourselves as ‘curators’ of this Study Room Guide. The readers are invited to enjoythe works and reflections, challenge their own preconceptions about motherhood andmothering practices, and add to the list of maternal performance practice, whilst lookingback to the past, sideways to the present and imagining our feminist maternal futures.This Study Room Guide is arranged alphabetically by artist’s first name (following feministtradition). Once we identified artists to ask to be part of this collection we explored theirwork; both as they had presented it to us and as we interpreted it. We identified a numberof themes and asked each artist or collective to write about their work in relation to aparticular strand we recognised in their maternal performance practice.
ongingNot all of the artists we contacted took up our invitation to write about their work and inour working process some themes disappeared; ethics, biology and reflection were droppedalong the way. However the themes that remain reflect the diversity of work being createdaround the maternal and inevitably illustrate the breadth of maternal experiences.In 2015 Bobby Baker recreated her seminal performance Drawing on a Mother’s Experience(1988) as Drawing on a (Grand) Mother’s Experience (2015) at the Southbank Centre inLondon. As feminist artist/mothers we are standing beside our feminist (grand) mothers.The works of Mary Kelly, Lea Lublin, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Laura Mulvey, Susan Hiller,the Mother Art Collective, the Magdalena Project network and Bobby Baker have been asource of inspiration, challenge and constant re-negotiations in our own work. A StudyRoom Guide on Live Art and Feminism asks the question ‘Are We There Yet?’. Yet is still tocome. Looking to the future is a hopeful act, by thinking of our futures we can imagine otherways of existing in the world, other ways of living and making art within and around thematernal. Through the everyday struggles in motherhood, and its repetitious cycle fromgeneration to generation, we discover (anew) Live Art practice as a space of solidarity,creativity and openness.In January 2016, at the Study Room in Exile event Motherhood and Live Art we explored theways in which performance-based art on the maternal differs from visual and fine art. Whatis specific about motherhood being represented through Live Art/performance? Wecollectively wondered about liveness and risk, and placed it alongside our experiences as
6(failing, good/bad) artist/mothers. We created a temporary community, which arrived atsome quick conclusions in relation to Live Art and Motherhood. Later on, Emily and Lenamade notes: Temporality and durational performance entail multiple and complex connections tomaternal arts practice. Whilst there’s a mutual resistance against dominant narratives in lots of our work,we recognize each other’s specific struggles. Issues of representation are not easily solved and they seem impossible to escapein/through performance. Action doesn’t necessarily need to be juxtaposed with performance; they might beone and the same thing. There’s a desire towards articulating the unsayable: a kind of admiration formonstrous, corporeal, viscous and excessive mothers.Inspired by everyone’s contributions as well as further research into maternal performancepractices we started dreaming about the creation of a new kind of maternal performanceaesthetics which would entail and complexify all of those issues as well as take intoconsideration maternal care, interdependency, a new sense of time and attention,repetition, boredom and thirst for new collaborations between ourselves and our children.We still continue to long for a new kind of maternal performance aesthetics, which wouldseriously consider the ethical and political dimensions of working with/about children, butalso fight for visibility of our own ambivalent and precarious identity formations asartist/mothers. We are hopeful that the work of the artists represented in these pages willhelp us get there.Emily Underwood-Lee and Lena Šimić
7Áine Phillipssex, birth & death (2003)sex birth & death, 2003. Photo by Nigel Rolfe.Áine Phillips is a performance artist based in the west of Ireland where she is head ofsculpture at Burren College of Art. She has been exhibiting multi-media performance works,installation and video in Ireland and internationally since the late 80s. She has created workfor multiple contexts; public art commissions, the street, club events, galleries and museumsincluding City of Women Festival Ljubljana, Kyoto Art Centre Japan, Stanley Picker GalleryLondon, Bunkier Sztuki Krakow, and Mobius Boston USA. She has been involved in curatingmajor Live Art and performance events in Ireland such as Tulca Live 2005-2007 and FutureHistories 2016. Her edited book Performance Art in Ireland: A History was published by theLive Art Development Agency and Intellect Books UK in 2015. Her work is supported by theArts Council of Ireland.www.ainephillips.com
8EroticismI created sex, birth & death in 2002 and performed it five times from 2003-2004 in Ireland,the UK, USA and Austria. It is my favourite performance work and I consider it the mostdeveloped, original and culturally significant work I have produced. The subject matter isabortion and motherhood - juxtaposing the two linked experiences and showing them astwo sides of the one coin. The deeper underlying theme of the work is eroticism which Iused to open up new readings of maternalism.In our (Northern European) culture this physical pleasure in motherhood is denied. In mypersonal experience giving birth was like an enormous orgasm and breastfeeding arousedsexual feelings in my whole body. I am sure I am not alone in these experiences. A sexual actbegins motherhood, why would the entire experience not relate back to sexuality? Iarticulate this correspondence in my script “Two who are separate become one, two whoare one become separate.”In sex, birth & death I consider the image of lactation to be a metaphor for female eroticism.The experience of breastfeeding is of a flowing (expression) of nourishing and deliciousbodily fluid from one body into another. The breast milk is both food and a form of pleasurefor both and links mother and baby in a symbiotic relationship paralleling and extending theunity of two bodies in pregnancy.In sex, birth & death I made what I hoped was an erotic performance of the representationsof maternal experience. I hoped the audience would feel my expressed pleasure in mymothering body and witness the maternal body as erotic. I also intended to explicitly linkabortion with motherhood and eroticism. In Ireland, abortion is illegal and Irish womentravel to the UK to avail of abortion services. 100,000 Irish women have had UK abortions,but admitting or talking about it publicly is still problematic. I wanted to normalise theexperience of abortion and place it along the continuum of female sexuality.Áine Phillips
9Anna FurseYerma’s Eggs (2003)Helen Spackman in Yerma's Eggs, 2003. Riverside Studios. Photo by Hugo Glendinning.Anna Furse is Professor of Theatre and Performance at Goldsmiths where she directs theinternational laboratory MA in Performance Making and is Co-Director of the Centre of theBody. Her career in professional theatre includes over 30 years as a director, writer, projectleader, programmer, artistic director, curator, consultant and educator. Artistic Directorshipsinclude BloodGroup (1980 – 86) and Paines Plough (1990 -95). She founded Athletes of theHeart in 2003 with a Wellcome Trust Impact Award. Her many collaborative projects includeworking with hospitals and health organisations as well as international venues, including coproductions in France, Serbia and Slovenia. Her most recent work has been shown at venuesincluding the Cantieri Culturali Zisa, Palermo, Live Collision, Dublin and GIFT UK festivals, andthe Michael Cacoyiannia Foundation, Athens. Anna is the editor of Theatre in Pieces – Politics,Poetics and Interdisciplinary Collaboration (Methuen 2011) an anthology of performance textsthat includes Don Juan.Who?/ Don Juan.Kdo? her co-productions with Mladinsko Gledalisce,Ljubljana (Shunt and Riverside Studios 2008). Her current project The Anatomy Act iscommissioned by CREATE Dublin (premiering Live Collision 2016).www.athletesoftheheart.org
10SubfertilityLorca’s poetic drama Yerma (meaning 'barren'), about a desperate childless peasant, wasthe catalyst for this exploration into the subfertile psyche. I wanted to get under the skin ofthe subject via the body in performance and reflect complexity and contradiction via alayering of elements. With Assisted Reproductive Technologies (A.R.T.), the human heartcollaborates with highly invasive medical technology. We are impelled to reconsider ourethical assumptions. We subject our bodies to a necessary splitting - the separation of eggsfrom ovaries, sperm from testes, reproduction from sexual intercourse - as our sex cellsbecome involved in a spectacular process of fusion and, if successful, growth outside us.Given the statistic that 1 in 6 couples suffer involuntary childlessness and fertility problemsin the UK it is striking how little such stories are told. But then, the subfertile tend toimplode, muted, suffering with gritted teeth out of a sense of powerlessness, failure, guiltand marginalisation. Our voices rarely come through into the culture. It was such silence Ichose to break. My more recent theatre research has reflected a subjective perspective in atriptych of very different projects on (non) reproduction and correlative issues since 2000.Yerma’s Eggs was inevitably a highly charged, personal work bearing the stamp of each ofmy collaborators. The performer’s body remained central, clothed and naked, screamingand whispering. The piece began with water, the source of life, and ended with the voice ofmy child. In between these lay the material of a performance that was inevitablyuncomfortable for an audience. The subject is rife with contradictions, particularly forwomen. Splicing together a medical and technological world with the visceral elusivenessand tenderness of physical theatre posed many but necessary challenges. To do justice tothe subject matter, machine and flesh had to be married. Medical imperative on the oneside and embodied emotion on the other are the dualities that the sub-fertile straddles,daily. We medicate and meditate. We inject and project. We imagine.3Anna Furse3Extract from ‘Performing in glass: reproduction, technology, performance and the bio-spectacular’, inFeminist Futures: Theatre, Performance, Theory, edited by Geraldine Harris and Elaine Aston (PalgraveMacMillan USA, 2006).
11Bean(m)other/ the untitled (2014)(m)other / the untitled, 2014. Venice International Performance Art Week.Photo by Monica Sobczak.Bean's work is predominantly performance led, working through the intersections ofinstallation, video and sound. Her work has been described as deliberately “accidental,scattered, scuffed, blurry and incomplete”, a statement that she ferociously upholds in herattempts to undermine systems of patriarchy & capitalism through the aesthetic, materialand durational choices within her practice. As both artist and curator she is interested inproducing work that is quietly yet overtly political, lacks linear narrative and challenges itsaudiences. She is interested in curating spaces and situations that connect artists, makers,thinkers and feelers and has done so through the creation of ]performance s p a c e [ andongoing research int
Art which was organised by Emily Underwood-Lee and Lena Šimić in January 2016 at the Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home in Liverpool, part of the Study Room in Exile series of events, in collaboration with the Live Art Development Agency.1 The artists who were not present at that gathering yet are featured in this Study Room Guide have come to our attention thanks to the .
Oct 22, 2014 · ART ART 111 Art Appreciation ART 1301 Fine Arts ART 113 Art Methods and Materials Elective Fine Arts . ART 116 Survey of American Art Elective Fine Arts ART 117 Non Western Art History Elective Fine Arts ART 118 Art by Women Elective Fine Arts ART 121 Two Dimensional Design ART 1321 Fine Arts ART
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ART 110 . Art Appreciation (2) ART 151 . Introduction to Social Practice Art (3) ART 281 . History of Western Art I (3) ART 282 . History of Western Art II (3) ART 384 . Art Since 1900 (3) ART 387. History of Photography (3) ART 389 . Women in Art (3) ENGL 270 . Introduction to Creative Writing (3)* HON 310 . Art in Focus (3)** each semester .
Printmaking/Digital Media: Art 231, Art 235, Art 270, Art 331, Art 370, Art 492 Painting: Art 104, Art 203, Art 261, Art 285, Art 361, Art 461, Art 492 The remaining 21 credits of Fine Arts electives may be selected from any of the above areas as well as
Chapter 1: Motherhood constructions: A personal story This thesis is strongly influenced by the impact socially constructed beliefs about motherhood have had upon me, both as a mother and as a nurse working within maternal and child
Mother-blame and mother-guilt are the result of an ideology of motherhood that has formed in Western culture since the Victorian era. This ideology romanticises motherhood and disregards the mother’s reality, providing a skewed conception of maternity. This,Author: Alexandra Kallman
identities. For example, in the classic second wave feminist text Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, Adrienne Rich defines motherhood as falling into two categories: motherhood as institution, a role constructed by the men for the public d
ART GLO: ART 103: History of Non-Western Art 3: F2 903N ARTH: Elective ART: GLO ART: 104 History of Photography: 3 F2 904: ARTH Elective: 3 ART: GLO ART: 105 Gender and Art: 3 F2 907D: ARTH Elective: 3 ART: GLO ART: 106 Contemporary Art 1945 to Present: 3 F2 902: ARTD Elective: 3 ART: GLO ART: 110 Design I:
