Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood

Until July 13, DCA (Dundee Contemporary Arts)

Sometimes the most fortuitous things occur by happenstance. I was about to walk down the stairs to the Jute café when I spotted the words, Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood, writ large over the entrance of the DCA gallery. The title didn’t pull me in exactly but I thought oh just a quick perusal would do to kill time before taking the bus to Fife. Yet that quick twenty minutes convinced me to return. And I did. While I didn’t get a chance to see all the short films screened in a room at the far end of the gallery on my return day (the roof started to leak from the torrential rain and all visitors were marshalled out and the gallery closed), I did spend a couple of very interesting hours looking at what was being shown.

On the face of it, the exhibition’s subject matter wouldn’t usually draw me in. Of late, I have begun to think there is something just a little too self-regarding about proclamations of motherhood from middle class professionals. I am thought to be middle-class myself, and certainly did share the hormonal, emotional roller-coasters, periods of sleep deprivations, identity loss and gut-wrenching anxieties about infant welfare that accompany motherhood for women from all walks of life. Kirsty Gunn and I also have long anguished conversations about the joys and pains of the Persephone-Demeter pattern of leave-taking and return; my daughter’s room is almost as it was when she left, and my husband tells me repeatedly that it isn’t a shrine. But while all these feelings were—and can be still—intensely felt, I feel that they are felt individually… so I do baulk at the collective pronoun and display of experiences collected under that appellation ‘motherhood’. I’m also not especially potty about babies and toddlers… but why that is the case I’ll have to unpack sometime in the future. It really was the grandiosity of the proclamation, ‘acts of creation’, (or so it seemed to me) that set my face against it—for those words (or so it seemed to me) suggest that women actively fashion a child from nothing. God like…. Look at me creating. Yet after those quick twenty minutes, I just had to return.

Acts of Creation engages both head and heart. The exhibition asks us to think about how ‘the image of motherhood changes when the artist is drawing on lived experience’ and ‘what challenges are levelled at motherhood as an institution through which the mother is idealised as self-sacrificing, wholesome, tireless and uncomplaining.’ Divided into four loose (if overlapping) colour coded thematic sections—Creation, Maintenance, Loss, The Temple—the exhibits take us on a journey, engendering a conversation with viewers. I started back to front—Gallery 1 rather than 2—wilfulness on my part I know, but also because I really didn’t think our experiences of the displays needed to be prescriptively linear, or sequential, despite the directive from the curators. Looking at one artist’s work might take you back to re-examine an earlier one; art works are in dialogue each other, each bring their own perspective to the conversation. Indeed this was the way I spent an absorbing two hours or more in the gallery… moving betwixt and between displays, mulling over some of the connections across the images that fascinated me, admiring, being absorbed and questioned, even probed by what I saw. Visitors will find their own ‘desire path’ through Acts of Creation but here are some trails that did stay with me.

About time I hear you say after my long preamble. Yes, one significant thread in Acts of Creation is about time. Jai Chuhan’s Self Portrait in Gallery 1 ‘essays’ on a woman in time. Self Portrait depicts a naked somewhat anxious-looking artist in the act of painting herself as a pregnant woman while a young girl (her daughter?) is playing underneath a portrait of an Indian deity; that girl is also reflected in a mirror positioned at far end of the scene. What caught my eye about Chuhan’s Self Portrait is the permeability of worlds depicted: between representation and reality, between women at different times in her life. The (painted) pregnant woman looks out from the canvas to the young girl playing on the floor under the Indian icon. Is the girl her future daughter as the artist statement seems to suggest, or is the painting also about an artist mother working also but keeping an eye on her young one? In addition, the unclothed artist painting looks outside the frame at viewers of Self Portrait. Why is the artist (seemingly) unclothed? I haven’t figured that out yet. Her lack of clothing does, of course, emphasises her body and her vulnerability. In Self Portrait, painted in sweeping strokes and deep colours, Chuhan seems to be asking questions about how we represent ourselves as women, and how we are represented by others.

Representing the diversity of women at different points in their life, real, imagined and symbolic, unsettles the sometimes all too easily taken-for-granted collectivity that named by the word ‘women’, while also—and quite necessarily—asserting it for emancipatory futures. There is Lea Cetera’s witty You can’t have it all, the title itself a jibe usually levelled at professional career women who also want a family. Here, the biological clock is remade as a hourglass uterus complete with fallopian tube and ovaries. Yet the sand in this hourglass is halted in its downwards trajectory, seemingly frozen… suggesting perhaps that that jibe also forms a trap. Motherload by Tabitha Soren treats time as a palimpsest of different moments in a mother’s life—a mother who makes art, but also sleeps and cares for her young children. Snapshots of a life over a year in her bedroom appear as layered coloured transparencies, one on top of another in a manner that allows us to see what is beneath or above simultaneously; different times in the mother’s day are all presented at the same moment. Despite Soren’s remarks that Motherload represents a ‘blur of cumulative, almost unregistered days of hazy, repetitive gestures of newborn parenting life’, these pieces turn ordinary moments into delicate luminous ‘moments of being’ of care and intimacy, to use Virginia Woolf’s phrase.

Susan Hiller’s Ten Months documents her pregnancy via a grid of black and white photographs of her growing like the rise of the full moon for each lunar cycle (so ten months not nine); these images are accompanied by aphoristic textual fragments from her journal from the same period. The grid format imparts a veneer of documentary, empirical record and categorisation which is deliberately counterpointed by their accompanying textual fragments (somewhat reminiscent of some of French Feminist philosophy). The framing of multiple grainy images of a swelling belly recall early photography’s frame-by-freeze-frame capture of motion in a zoetrope, albeit laid flat here rather than in the round. In the last frame image of her fully rotund belly, Hiller calls attention to the conventional schism between photographic documentation (‘seeing… natural fact’) and her typewriter textual inscriptions (‘feeling’… cultural artefacts), and suggests that one need not choose between the two. Truth should acknowledge ‘contradictions… ambiguities.’

The maternal body… human, machine, animal, and all acts in between. A number of art works explore how technology has impacted on childbirth and child rearing. Fani Parali’s Incubator comprises a metal skeletal frame suggesting a neonatal incubator in which is laid a life-sized beautifully detailed pencil drawing of a baby; sounds of the infant gurgling and the mother responding can be heard when one walks past the sculpture. All sorts of confusing and conflicting emotions surface as a response to what is a rather surreal sculpture. The very fine drawing of the child draws you in, as does the infant’s gurgling sounds but the infant is but a drawing, and the bare metal frame of the incubator distances viewers and jars for there is very little that is soft about it. Incubators are, of course, part of the technology need to keep premature babies alive, and such medical developments are needed for human beings to live if not thrive.

The artist statement accompanying The Birth Madonna by Valie Export suggests that she is riffing off Michaelango’s Pieta; in her print, a woman sits on top of a front-loading washing, out of which spills red cloth signifying a afterbirth bloodied mess. The reality of household chores including laundry is at variance with the religious connotations of the ‘Madonna’; but there is also a surreal jokiness about the image this kind of white goods ‘birthing’. Wangechi Mutu’s Fertility Heal IX, a compellingly beautifully compact and neat sculpture of a woman’s pelvis is made from red clay, wood beads, crystals, and also acrylic high heels shoes; the latter merge with sculptural red clay pelvic bones and become a pair of horns in its mash up of what is natural and what isn’t; that high heels signifying sexuality are used in the sculpture seems somehow very appropriate for a representation of woman’s pelvis. Camille Henrot’s watercolour of a mother after birth expressing breast milk for her baby via a pump also gestures towards how technology may now be an integral part of maternity now—‘cyborg’ maternity as the artist statement claims.

Yet, it is the animal aspect of birthing (or unbirthing) that most fascinated me in Acts of Creation. Janine Antoni’s humorous photograph of a woman taking a bath in a cattle drinking trough surrounded by cows is a deliciously unsettling example; one of the black cows has its head in the trough and is positioned as if suckling from her breast. The photograph stages wittily—and uncomfortably—the scene of milk production; the human mother-animal is as much of a milk animal as the cow. Cathie Pilkington’s Surrogate is darker, depicting a small life-like monkey hugging a rather sinister-looking panda soft toy; it recalls Harry Harlow’s unsettling and cruel experiments into infant attachments using young rhesus monkeys. Strong emotional responses are likely to swirl around anyone looking at the sculpture for some time: shock, pathos and horror in equal measure.

Catherine Elves’ video of a lactating breast and an infant suckling can’t but remind every breast feeding mother of how much their bodies are not their own; milk spurts out uncontrollably from a fully engorged breast with the faintest thought of one’s baby. Maternal bodies seem to have a visceral life outwith rational and conscious control, and when breast feeding my daughter all those years ago this was puzzling, appalling and marvellous all at once.

Fleshly womanly bodies figure large in the displays, sometimes fecund, sometimes barren. Paula Rego’s Abortion Series etchings are immensely powerful; one of the women in the series of three is shown squatting in pain over a chamber pot (or some such), head pushed against dishevelled bed linen, while in the background an armchair is knocked over as a sign of the extreme pain the women is suffering in her unbirthing. All the women in this series are alone, some are grimacing, face and body in pain; one is shown with her legs wide open, hands clutching the stirrups that could help in the delivery of the unwanted child. Yet this woman returns the gaze of viewers looking at her defiantly.

Abortion Series by Paula Rego

Loss… Motherhood often presented as an expectant story that ends with the birth and care of a healthy child. That the exhibition also tackles disability and loss is much to its credit. Miscarriage and infertility are also given space in the displays and to my mind forms one of the most poignant sequences in Acts of Creation. The private keening over the inability to have a child when all around you share photos of their newborns, or the grief that accompanies miscarriage can make it so very difficult to look at swelling bellies or mothers wheeling their young charges in prams. I was so very moved by this thread in the displays, and they took me back to my own miscarriages many years ago. The combination of Self-Portrait with Lost Baby, and Her name is Rosie set underneath the self-portrait, both by Nancy Willis, is full of pathos, as is Elina Brotherus’ Annonciation, ‘waiting for an angel who never shows up’ after five years of infertility treatment. The photographic sequence of (mostly) a young woman captured in a variety of domestic, intimate and reflective poses, the stock pile of drugs for fertility treatment, speaks to powerful forces outside a woman’s control too… the all-consuming desire, the yearning and keening over what one cannot have. Brotherus’ final photograph is added to signal a coming-to-terms with barreness; there she holds a baby surrogate in the form of a small dog amidst leafy surroundings. However the earlier sequences were so wrenching that I’m not sure that last photo provided any closure in my own mind. Jessa Fairbrother’s Role Play, a sequence of black and white images of a woman posing with a cushion painted in gold, simulating a pregnant belly swelling up and also shrinking, is so very compelling. I almost couldn’t bear to look at it. The painted gold expands to colour the cushion but also leaks out in rivulets around the woman who appears less photographically realistic and more painterly in the last few frames of the display.

Role Play by Jessa Fairbrother

After my return visit, I thought to myself, what’s in a name? Motherhood… That question brings to mind Denise Riley’s now largely forgotten book, Am I that Name?, published in 1988, which was so very important in academic circles for a time. In it Riley asserts rather strikingly (especially to feminists) that what the word ‘women’ names is ‘a volatile collectivity in which female persons can be very differently positioned, so that the apparent continuity of the subject of “women” isn’t to be relied on; “women” is both synchronically and diachronically erratic as a collectivity, while for the individual, “being a woman” is also inconstant, and can’t be an ontological foundation.’ And why? Because what that name signifies changes across time and in relation to how biological and social processes are understood, interpreted and interlinked. Despite intersectionality, that name may not also always occupy front of house and in advance of any other kind of identity we might inhabit (social position, class, ethnicity etc) at any given time. Thus the volatility and mutability of such an idea of a collective. However, as Riley is at pains to also assert, ‘a severe philosophical struggle to penetrate this category has not eliminated the tactical need to periodically break again into separately gendered designation’. We may still need that collective pronoun for emancipatory agency but we should not reify or petrify it. Motherhood. The exhibition offers more pathways than what I have mentioned here all too briefly. For example, Barbara Walker’s Louder than Words series show images of city spaces and her son’s form drawn on racialised police surveillance sheets speaks to a thread on black mothers while Marlen Dumas Underground Series is but just one of the mother-daughter art collaborations. These take you down other ‘desire paths’ that in your visit you might walk in contrast to mine. Acts of Creation is so much more than the sum of its parts, however beautiful or compelling each individual work might be. It certainly takes up Riley’s challenge to think about how we name, and what is signified by names, very thoughtfully and engagingly.

Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood

Reflecting on the 2025 DJCAD degree show...

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