Description
The Maternal in Creative Work examines the interrelation between art, creativity and maternal experience, inviting international artists, theorists and cultural workers to discuss their approaches to the central feminist question of the relation between maternity, generation and creativity.
This edited collection explores various modes and forms of art practice which look at mothers as subjects and as artists of the maternal experience, and how the creative practice is used to accept, negotiate, resist or challenge traditional conceptions of mothering. The book brings together some of the major projects of maternal art from the last two decades and opens up new ways of conceptualizing motherhood as a creative and communicative practice. Chapters include intergenerational discussion of art practices in the 20th and 21st centuries, representations of breastfeeding and infertility in creative projects, the notion of the ‘unfit mother’ and childlessness, together with the experiences of women and men that take on maternal identities through many forms of kinship and social mothering.
The Maternal in Creative Work will be essential reading for interdisciplinary students and scholars in cultural studies, gender studies and art theory and will have wider appeal to audiences interested in maternity, childcare, creativity and psychoanalysis.
Table of Contents
Forward by Lisa Baraitser; Preamble by Valerie Walkerdine; Chapter 1: Maternal art practice: emerging field of artistic enquiry into motherhood, care and time; Part I: Intergenerational maternal discussions; Chapter 2: Feminist intergenerational inheritance: a conversation; Chapter 3: Maternal Metaphors I and II: a labour of motherlove; Chapter 4: A cord that is never done away with: an aesthetic ontology of the pre-birth scene with Francesca Woodman and Bracha L. Ettinger; Chapter 5: Prisms of mourning: gender, justice and hope: Carrie Mae Weems’ Colored People, 1989-1990; Chapter 6: The Mothernists; Chapter 7: A.M.M.A.A. – The Archive for Mapping Mother Artists in Asia; Part II: Encountering the maternal in artistic practice; Chapter 8: Blueprint for a ghost; Chapter 9: Maternal time travel: epistolary praxis as intergenerational care work; Chapter 10: A mother’s work: a mother/daughter, seamstress/fibre artist’s merging practice and politics; Chapter 11: The mother artist in the age of performance reproduction; Chapter 12: Returning to ourselves: Medea/Mothers’ Clothes and Patience one decade on; Chapter 13: Unravelling family fictions: Stories We Tell, Daughter Rite and My Life Without Me; Part III: Maternal future: Interrupting the field; Chapter 14: One for Sorrow: the collaborative work of mother and not-yet-mother; Chapter 15: Identity through injury: contemporary adoption and the unfit working class mother; Chapter 16: The motherhood imperative: fertility, feminism, art; Chapter 17: Drawing as a creative exploration of ‘circumstantial childlessness’; Chapter 18: Becoming ordinary: making homosexuality more palatable on TV; Afterwords: mothering the future
