There is Always a Mother

Images of mothers abound in art history, from Christian Madonnas and Theotokos— the god-bearer, to Buddhist Guan Yin, to Hindu Kali and Shakti. Motherhood images act as a system of signs, triangulated between rich traditions of mother mythologies, cultural attitudes towards women, and actual bodies doing the messy job of birthing. Mother images have been idealized, sentimentalized, and canonized, serving both as source of inspiration and instrument for regulating women’s bodies. The physical complexity of the maternal experience has been nearly absent, hidden behind the conscribed archetype of “mother”.

1970’s feminist artists transported the female body off the canvas/pedestal, to activate it as subject rather than object of desire and consumption. While women’s experiences began to be visible in artistic discourse, motherhood remained taboo, tucked behind the dual curtains of liberation and traditionalism. Mary Kelly’s Post Partum Document (1973-79) threw open a door on the hidden labor of motherhood, positing the question- is it possible to portray the maternal experience without objectification of bodies? Her response was to not depict bodies at all, but to present the material residue of the mother/child relationship. This included her son’s worn clothing, schematic drawings, and famously, dirty nappies, embodied materials presented in a cerebral psychological framework, acting as index, fetish object, and memorial. Kelly’s work revealed the intimacy and labor embedded in the role, the overlapping systems in which the very concept of mothering is formed and depicted. This work brought actual mothering into the open.

Motherhood today remains a contested cultural space, where norms of gender and agency over women’s bodies continue to be sharply policed. Mothers are elevated, fetishized, criticized, judged, analyzed, examined with the heartless eye of a patriarchy that defines and confines the bodies of mothers. In a moment where support for vulnerable bodies of all kinds is increasingly restricted, and definitions of mothering are reduced to the most conservative idealized form, society continues to aim the harshest judgment and the most facile praise on mothers.

And yet, there is always a mother. Every human came from a particular body, a bearer, behind the icon and the mythology. No less harshly surveilled, today’s artist mothers, and parents in general, have asserted their place in the visual discourse. The artists in this exhibition are inheritors and inventors of these tangled cultural systems. They have shifted the view from looking at a distant ideal, to looking out from a mother-body. Today’s artist mothers defiantly depict the full range of the quotidian maternal experience, from the kernels of truth in the stereotype to radical departures that foreground its unkempt – and unpaid— labor. From intimate representation to joyous abstraction, this exhibition hums with the fecundity of mothering. The works in the exhibition act as both iconophile and iconoclast; they contend with the pleasures and challenges of mothering with sharp tools and tender materials. Gentle and covetous, bulging and smothering, from loving embrace to endless labor, the mothering body in this exhibition is monumental, intimate, adoring, exhausted, proud, defiant, symbolic and deeply actual.

Patricia Miranda

8/25