Statement working title: Motherkind/Motherart: Representation of Mother Artists in the Art World: Are They In/Visible?
Increasing the visibility of Mother Artist – does it require Monumental works in order for others tto take notice?
Guilt
Shame
Art
Motherguilt
Mothershame
Motherart
Quotes from book the baby on the fire escape page 2, Alice Walker saw her daughter in her mind‘s eye as she worked the lonely, sucking of her thumb, a giant stopper in my throat Tony Morrison driving to work with a pad of paper in the car so that she could write whenever the traffic slowed here the act of writing in parentheses art is not continuous, but provisional contingent subject to disruption, and yet the words are still coming and the work is getting done
Quote from a journalist on the very first page when a new child arrives it says if two strangers have moved into your house. The first is a child. The second is yourself as a mother the women Phillips documents all felt cleaved into Hilary Kelly from Atlantic.
Page 3, Alice Neel said that until she received a major respective in her 70s I had always felt in a sense that I didn’t have a right to paint because I had two sons and I had so many things I should be doing and here I was painting
Pages three and four „What does it mean to create, not alone in ‚a room of one’s own’ but in a shared space? What kinds of work have come out of that space? What is the shape of a creative mother‘s life?”
This was my plan to explore the blank spot on the map where mothering and creativity converge I had never been able to convey the full power of my own life as a mother I remember how empty even the simple sentence I have two children felt in comparison to the experience as though I was recounting a dream that made no sense in daylight because I didn’t have words I wanted other to speak for me in investigating the lives of great women I hope to see my own experience with new eyes.
Page 5 the Freudian view was that mothering was the end of growth and achievement for a woman as a mother. She merely assumed her natural role by the time a woman is 30 Freud claimed her psyche has taken up his final positions and there are no paths open to her for further development . Fuck you, Freud.
Page 6, playwright Sarah Ruhl, looking at the lack of mothers as protagonists wonders if the experience of motherhood is unstageable beyond narrative and language then she worries that the experience is tellible, but no one wants to see it. Mothers aren’t meant to have points of view. “
Page 7, Le Guin’s cynical observation that to become a wife and mother is to turn into a nobody. I find it unsatisfying another mystification. I can’t believe that mothering is beyond representation. I think making mother’s mysterious is another way of keeping them unacknowledged.
Page 8, Bar speculate that to be apparent is to have a subjectivity that is shared in Pin on that has to budge up to make room for radically unpredictable other when she became a mother, she felt changed to her child unable to finish a sentence think or sleep lost her sense of being agile capable, quick self reflective as she explored this new state new ways of seeing emerged. The child’s relentlessly, unpredictable and extreme presence forced her into an appreciation of experiences. She has skimmed over before
Page 9 Sarah writes there was a time when I first found out I was pregnant with twins that I saw only a state of conflict when I looked at theater and parenthood I saw only competing loyalties, and I thought my writing life was over. There were times when it felt as though my children were annihilating me And finally I came to the thought right then annihilate me that other self was a fiction anyhow and then I could breathe I could investigate the pauses. In accepting interruption, she was able to recollect herself and recover her artistic agency.
Page 10, perhaps interruption and disruption are not what keep me from seeing mothering clearly but are the conditions of maternal creativity.
Page 11 if Rich’s energies of creation and relation, can’t be united, parents can still hold them in it sometimes frustrating sometimes generative Balance. Ruhl compares the balance to a heartbeat, the “great systole and diastole of work and children”
This is the baby on the fire escape the precarious situation in which the child is just far enough out of sight and mind for the mother to have a talk with her muse. It’s the mental and temporal distance that an artist or writer needs to place between herself and her children so she can have the presence the permission the little “sips of selfhood” (Natasha Randall) that sustain creativity it’s keeping and letting go it’s Art and Care going on at once for a moment a day a lifetime.
Page 13 “Of woman born” Adrianne Rich said of herself in the “family centered” 1950s. “I had no idea of what I wanted what I could or could not choose. I only knew that to have a child was to assume adult womanhood to the full to prove myself to be ‘like other women’”
Page 14 Enright writes: “ people who mind children suffer from despair. It happens all of a sudden they realize all of a sudden that they still exist. “
Most of the women in this book started out following the motherhood, plot all of them contended with it. All of them left it when they ran off the cliff and found themselves in mid air when they felt knocked sideways by Love relegated to the margins of their own lives, when they found themselves story less they had to improvise at some point they had to think very clearly about who they were and what they wanted and have the courage to break with expectations-and lack of expectations-in order to make that happen working in mothering against the grain they learned fought suffered and grew
Page 16 you may lose your way feel vulnerable or pushed out of the center of your life. You may find yourself experience in your authority. You may contend with the depression, disappointment, or “overwhelming, unacceptable anger” (Rich) for Anne Lamott, the hardest part of becoming a parent was “being face-to-face with one’s secret insanity and brokenness and rage.”
“Motherhood is an identity in the passage to motherhood is one of the most significant shifts in identity that transpires in adulthood“ Andrew Solomon author off far from the tree rights in his 2013 doctoral thesis in psychology that a woman who becomes a parent has to deal with two new relationships: one with her child one with herself as a mother building these relationships-and for a creative mother rebuilding her relationship to her vocation-involves redefining herself as a person, both in relation to her child and in relation to what she expects from motherhood in effect, she comes of age all over again.
OVERWHELMING UNNACCEPTABLE ANGER
THE CONDITIONS OF MATERNAL CREATIVITY
ART IN MOTHERHOOD
IN(VISiBLE)
MOTHERCORE
MOTHERLAMP
MOTHERKIND
Pharrell Williams „All that women need to do to end human kind is to stop having children”
Page 17 a person in the act of mothering is someone who contents with her child, with motherhood as an institution, and with a self that is changing in response to those two powerful influences. Ideally, she is also someone who goes on developing in response to her work, her children, and the other events in her life, who gains self-knowledge, who gains or regains her agency. She is not only transformed, as a person, an artist, when she becomes a mother, she is transformed over and over by it, throughout her life. Her acts of self-creation and self-revision are her story.
Page 18 “The institution of motherhood finds all mothers more or less guilty” Adrianne Rich writes
Page 27 „ you have to have a certain sense of defiance in you (as an artist) so don’t self-destruct” Camille Billops
“To become both painter and mother, Alice(Neel) had had to spend a lifetime refusing others’ expectations”
Page 34 „ Yet it seemed to her that she, not the world, was divided. ‘I always had this awful dichotomy. She later said.I loved Isabetta, of course I did. But I wanted to paint.’”Alice Neel
Page 39 “Alice knew how easy it was for a woman to get drawn into the role of nurturing a man’s career.”
Page 42
“ Alice (Neel) was ready to commit to the kind of self created household that Adrianne Rich called ‘outlaws from the institution of motherhood’”