Other Mother’s or Inter-ruption is an exhibition of visual art with associated performance’s, poetry readings, film showings and talks by those who work with the subject of motherhood.
It will include work by internationally and nationally known artists and those whose practice may emerge as relevant to the exhibition through the curatorial process.
The exhibition aims to show diversity of practice and to give rise to women’s art work, their voices and stories. There is a lack of “real” testimonies and representations of the maternal from the perspective of the mother.
The exhibition seeks to show the work of those practitioners that challenge idealised representations of motherhood. Subjects that it would like to represent include fertility, reproduction technologies, birth experiences, the maternal body, ambivalence, motherhood and postnatal depression, motherhood loss, separation and trauma, work and motherhood, motherhood fears and desires, motherhood and the matrixial, maternal jouissance, motherhood and sleeping, motherhood and food, motherhood and breastfeeding, motherhood and identity and how our identity as mothers is bound up with our relationships with our own mothers.
“In her essay “Feminism and Motherhood” Susan Griffin has compared her note taking on motherhood to a resistance fighters journal where there is “time only for brief illuminations which we must record between interruprions”. The Mother Reader.
Lisa Baraitser has written in her book Maternal Encounters, The Ethics of Interruption about a link between the constant interruption from the demands of mothering and creativity.
This exhibition seeks to provide a platform to further understand contemporary motherhood and what it is to be an artist-mother. I believe that it is essential to show these artists who work with the maternal, because what they create is rare, beautiful, brave and important to our understanding of art and of others.