Does It Take a Village? Or Knowledge? Beyond the Autonomous Artist: Mothergap, Cultural Expectations, Economic Conditions and Collective Creativity.
Introduction
Based on my research, just like there’s a “female shaped absent presence” in the world of statistics (Criado Perez, 2020, Preface), there’s a mothergap in the academic and institutional art world, however unaware of that gap village female artists exist and continue creating. As indicated by Louise Bourgeois “A woman has no peace as an artist until she proves over and over that she won’t be eliminated.” (Bourgeois, 1939, quoted in Showalter, 2019) when she wrote to a friend in 1939 while on the slow, winding path to succeed as an artist, her incredible determination fueled by the relationship with her abusive father, love and ambivalence while raising two boys, grief from losing her mother, and no female relatives. Simultaneously, ‘uneducated’ lace artists from Koniaków village in the Silesia Area of Poland manage sustaining the art of lacemaking since late 1800s until now, alongside mothering, farming, taking care of the household. By artists I consider not only academics, but all women who choose artistic practice as their vocation, and continue making art throughout their lifetime, regardless institutional support. I reject invisibility of the so called ‘uneducated’ artists, because too often, as identified by bell hooks “this speech about the “other” annihilates, erases” (hooks, 1989 p. 22). Instead I choose to believe in inclusivity and support the proposal of curator Ewa Klekot, who suggests that mother-artists could negotiate visibility and resist marginalisation within artistic institutions by omitting the hierarchical approach based on the fact that art can be measured.
”perhaps one of the last frontiers in exercises of feminist art historical scholarship would be to banish traditional aesthetic and class hierarchies by integrating self-taught artists-including those who have been classifed as folk, naive, outsider, or neurodivergent – with schooled, so-called fine artists” (Klekot, 2025, cited in Gingeras, 2025, p. 19).