Frankenstein's Mother - Mapping structures, and researching ways of creating new ones, within the interrelated entanglement of artistic practice and motherhood

Abstract

American artist Judy Chicago once told another artist, Helen Million Ruby, that she had to choose between her children and artistic practice. When asked about this, she commented that she was not giving an ultimatum but merely stating a fact. In the foreword to the book The Post-Partum Document, Lucy Lippard noted that British artist Mary Kelly was “the first woman in the art world who let it be known she had a child. The rest of them kept it hidden.” These two anecdotes are from the 1970s, and the situation in which the entanglement of my artistic practice and maternity differs from theirs, but it is still complicated and sometimes conflicting. My maternity and artistic practice are deeply intertwined and dependent on each other. They were conceived at the same moment, and they feed off and influence each other. They are simultaneously intertwined and separate in the same way a mother and her child can be. I use my artistic practice to process and reconsider different aspects of motherhood. By doing so, I hope to offer additional readings to add to this container. Simultaneously, the knowledge produced by my experiences of motherhood is the origin and raw material on which I base my artistic practice. This essay aims to research different feminist strategies to approach this interrelated entanglement of motherhood and artistic practice. Situated within the thematic framework of the maternal turn, I wish to explore the possibilities of regarding motherhood as artistic practice. The maternal turn is described by professor in contemporary art and theory, Natalie Loveless, as: “[...]marked by new social media networks, curatorial projects, and recent and upcoming publications that argue for the maternal as a crucial location from which to explore the conditions, ethics, and futures of feminism today.” I will discuss maternal artworks of four artists, Catherine Opie, Sanna Lemken, Mary Kelly, and Mierle Laderman Ukeles. What different strategies and methods are employed within their works, and how do these strategies operate within the fields of motherhood and art? They have all engaged with the mother/artist entanglement and used their artistic practice to question both the institution of motherhood and the hegemonies within art, but their approaches differ. When I discuss motherhood, which I will throughout this essay from several different angles, I speak about it as a practice and not a state of being. Similarly, this practice is, in this text, not regarded as limited by biological bounds. Feminist theory and history of science professor Donna Haraway propose that we should “Make Kin Not Babies!”5 By this, she argues that disconnecting kinship from biological parenthood is crucial to enable an overture to extend the concept of kinmaking outside of the limits of Western family apparatuses. Haraway proposes that we use the words kinnovations, and clanarchy when discussing unconventional parenting. Originally proposed by Lizzie Skurnick, Kinnovator is a word for a person who creates families in unconventional ways. The word clanarchist refers to a person who refuses traditional definitions of family.