Motherhood & Live Art #2 On ethics and performance processes with children Study Room in Exile Event, 29 April 2017 Document written by Miffy Ryan
Miffy and Matilda, taken by Agnes 4 (2017).
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Before we began I asked the participants to be aware of what types of language we were choosing to discuss our practice. Anecdotal, emotive, theoretical, autobiographical, conceptual, technical, political, aesthetic? And then to consider how these modes combine within our maternal aesthetics. Lastly I asked that the participants consider what aesthetic choices and decisions were made in connection to care and child-rearing responsibilities.
Detail from group list, Motherhood & Live Art #2 (Study Room in Exile, 2017).
The Participants each presented 5 minutes on their practice, process and reflections on ethics. They appear here in the same running order as on the day. Miffy Ryan’s 5 Minutes I asked myself how am I overspent and what are the constraints of being a mother? Performance involves taking risks – does it make you a bad mother to include your children in those risks? Do I care? Is my overwhelming urge to include the girls an excess of love, am I overbearing? Then I began to think about my own mother and how transgressive she can be... Let me describe what happened when my mum decided to join in with my performance… My heart sank initially because the ground was very wet and I wanted to roll around in a bag with my daughters, neither of whom wanted it over their heads. The logic of Bagism is to free yourself from your identity and the constraints of subjectivity. The girls found the idea of the bag on their heads the opposite, claustrophobic. This impression was perhaps not helped by my explanation, a few weeks prior, of the concept of child kidnapping as being shoved in a bag and grabbed; a bit extreme you might think, my logic being that a bit of fear is healthy. At this point, when I realised the girls wouldn’t ‘voluntarily’ join in and if I forced them it would be ethically dubious; my mum, who was hovering on the sidelines, leapt into action. Busily plonking bags on the girls’ heads and donning one herself, cue kids crying, screaming and struggling in the back, hysterical laughter from my small audience and funny ghost noises from my mum-in-a-bag.
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Avant-Garde in the Community! Bagism (2016) Miffy Ryan, Picnic in the Park, Loughborough with Frances Ryan and Matilda & Agnes Bardsley, Images Victoria Mason.
Lena Šimić’s 5 Minutes Lena responded to notions of refusal, and consent, as well as the question of benefit and what her children had to gain from performing with her. Lena was able to reflect across a broad time span of ten years, or more, of working with her four sons, and collaborating as a family The Institute for the Art & Practice of Dissent at Home (an ongoing performance intervention initiative). Lena felt that working performatively with children enables a – what I would call – aesthetic collapse, in the sense that they prevent that removal from life that is possible through more controlled processes. She asked aloud “How trained are my children? In a sense how primed are they for these performance scenarios?” Lena described the performance Mother & Son: that just sounds so sad with her oldest son (now 16, then 10) Neal at 2S5G Carol Luby’s house, the performance was an exam scenario and all the adults took part. It was a durational piece and after a short while her son took out his phone and began to play on it, this was unplanned and was an act of autonomy on Neal’s part. Lena felt it illustrated the subversive potential of adult-child collaboration. Lena then presented to the group the moral dilemma she has in regards to her work with her children, she described performing at the Tate Modern with her son Sid (aged 8 at the time) and although they had planned it together and enjoyed it together, she still felt it was professionally really for her benefit not his. Lena talked about changes in her children’s attitudes towards performing and how receptive they were to creating artwork depending on the age of the child.
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Lena has worked with imagery of infanticide in her work, for example the figure of Medea in Medea/Mothers’ Clothes (2003) performed with two of her children, she wonders in time (as they get older) what they will make of that work. Lastly she reflected on the older children’s enthusiasm for the more political/ activist strands of their practice rather than the more aesthetic/performance based ones; for example they participate in The Family Activist Network which they like because they are interacting with other participants of a similar age.
Mother & Son: that just sounds so sad (2011) Lena Šimić with Neal Anderson at 25SG in Newcastle image by Arto Polus.
Helen Sargeant’s 5 Minutes Helen considered the nature of over-expenditure as a mother-artist. “Socks... are sensual, meaningful, and putting them on can become stressful for my son Naoise.” Helen talked about her two week residency M(other) & Son (2016) with her 8 year old son Naoise in Finland. She spoke of the emotions felt, anxiety, exposure, refusal, stress, guilt, embarrassment. Helen described the lateness, the disorder and the reality of operating on a different timescale all as a result of working with her son. She described the sensation of being overstretched, and of having to work to a child’s timeframe and adapt to his lack of awareness for schedules. Helen reflected
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on how creativity was born out of the need to find solutions to everyday problems and situations, for example the delay caused by her son befriending a ladybird. Helen described the alienation from the art context she was supposedly a part of during the residency, she found herself connecting with bus drivers and incidental people along the routes she took with her son rather than ‘networking.’
Shadow Portrait & Pedestrian Erasure (2016) Helen & Naoise Sargeant Tampere, Finland, M(other) & Son residency.
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Claire Hickey’s 5 Minutes Claire reflected on the strong emotions that underpin maternal aesthetics. Claire sang an Irish folk lullaby, Down by the River Sawyer, about a woman who kills her baby. “...she stuck that knife in the bebe's 'ead weila, weila walia the more she stuck it, the more it bled down by the river Sawyer.” Claire then spoke, she told the group “before becoming a mother my practice was undefined, but becoming a mother has been all consuming. The lullaby was sang to me by my father, although he would change the words a little, when I found myself caring for my baby it came back to me.” Claire spoke of reciting poetry whilst hanging out the washing, she described processes bound in repetition, time, conflict and care. She described feeling guilt and discomfort, rage, despair and depression. She described the making of the personal public and how she felt the work is about her because of her child. Claire said “the creation of the work saved me, and opened up for me a community of women who could share these experiences.” Moving forward and progressing her practice Claire is concerned with the nature of collaboration, consent and authorship.
Grief Unloving Over (2015) film still, Claire Hickey & Emily Warner.
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Dawn Yow’s 5 Minutes Dawn described her autobiographical and visceral process, and its importance to her personal freedom. Dawn has been working with photography recording the visceral moments of her children’s lives, she has also been microblogging her daily experiences on facebook since her youngest daughter Lennox, now 10 months, was born. When Dawn fell pregnant with her third child she worried her freedom was being taken away, her freedom to practice as an artist and retain autonomy as a person. Dawn described her process “I save bodily fluids, vomit and blood on tissues. I put them in a plastic bag in a drawer. I am writing about my daily happenings for a year. Some days my head is not in writing mode, and the act of writing is a chore. All the tissues I save get tossed in a pile by the computer until my husband suggests I clean it up. I save food items splashed on paper.”
Gradient From A Bloody Tongue (2015), scan of bloodied tissues, Dawn Yow.
Sarah Black’s 5 Minutes Sarah looked at the nature of privacy and choice within her practice. Sarah described how she has positioned herself as a “mother as performing a curatorial role” within her family. Sarah has engaged with the ethical and theoretical perspectives of Lisa Baraitser and Sarah Ruddick, in brief her ethical position is to “not expose the children too much”. Sarah is completing a PhD so is required to interrogate the ethical nature of her work, as well as complying with the university’s ethical frame-work. Her maternal aesthetic seeks to re-write mainstream ethics through the mother’s perspective and make power relations more visible. Sarah described her process as “never having asked the children to perform as such they are just there. I decided to ask Oliver, my son, if he wanted to document family life. Questions arose about Oliver’s role, collaborator? Has he got agency? In my mind I would reverse the process” of the gaze? Role reversal between mother and child? “I would give the camera to my son.” Sarah describes her process as polyvocal the first book made in the subsequent work is titled Oliver’s World (2014). “I had been very caught up in reading ethics from Ruddick, Baraitser, and touching on Kristeva etc. it became very dry, when really I needed to think of ethics as a way
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of being in research rather than a doing from the outside...it really is about setting boundaries that are mutually/morally acceptable that become themselves a practice and a way of being rather than just practical decisions... I will try to more, and rethink how I am approaching ethics within my critical framework. It is a way of looking at things.”
Jayne Farley - 31 Days Old (2016) film still, Sarah Black
Jennifer Verson’s 5 Minutes Jen tackled the idea of a ‘cult of motherhood’ through the notion of Otherness. Jen as an outsider was acutely aware when she came to the UK of ‘the idealised British mother’ and its flipside ‘the other mother.’ She makes work as part of the collective Migrant Artists Mutual Aid (founded in 2011). Jen reflected on the experience of being, or feeling like, a refugee or outsider, “forming a cult of motherhood can become a liberating political force. It can be reclaimed, the cult of motherhood re-humanises”. Jen spoke about being disturbed by recent political events and how she has been researching the notion of “moral exclusion” something she finds intensely disturbing. Jen spoke about doing things together, the idea of the cult of motherhood provides a framework for this. Jen spoke about her responsibility as a mother, how she felt it was her job to help her girl Ella to function, how she is a role model to her. Jen described herself as a “SHODDY MUM”. This is an act of reclamation also, because the cult of motherhood over-idealises and over-emphasises a mothers, supposedly required, perfection.
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Songs like women migrate (2016) Pamela Mastrilli with Migrant Artists Mutual Aid.
What Is Our Duty of Care to Our Children Who Are Represented In Our Artworks? A Collective List.
Detail from List, Motherhood & Live Art #2 (Study Room in Exile, 2017).
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We discussed the ways we had all interrogated our gaze as mothers, the maternal body and ourselves. We applied a feminist reading of a Marxist model, one of collective responsibility and shared labour within the family, to argue that the notion of children performing with their mothers could be constituted as a reasonable contribution to the families work. The analogy was, as the farmer’s children would tend to the land... the artist’s child would participate in cultural production. This argument certainly resonated amongst us and has relevance to all of our processes. We discussed the nature of consent and whether children are able to, or not. The notion of active consent was invoked in order to deliberate on what constituted an ethical process. We agreed that we should not assume consent has been given because of the circumstances or context, for example, we are part of the same family. Consent is actively sought in each new situation, process, or work between the mother and child. We were all in agreement that the ethical framework shifts depending on the focus of the work, is the focus the mother? The child? Their interactions? Or is the child being used symbolically? And so forth. We shared sensations and worries about feeling transgressive, or not switching off a sense of invading our family’s privacy. We wondered whether any of the great male artists had ever suffered from such dilemmas. We do things/ save things, and we are not sure what they are for, or even what they are.
Naoise hiding behind his pillow case comforter to prevent me taking a picture of him (2016) Helen Sargeant
The Ruined Night (2016) Dawn Yow
We have been thinking about the relationships that we hold with our children as creative collaborators and the "power" that we hold as artist/mother. We are providers, nurturers, facilitators, instigators, and observers. How do we give agency to ourselves as an artist and to our children? We have thought about the importance of valuing and recognising our children's input, how the art is "ours" not mine. We
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have been thinking about the relationships we hold with our mothers, and other mothers, as part of our maternal aesthetic and process.
My Mother Climbs in Through the Window (2017) Miffy Ryan
The ethics behind featuring your children in your art (or elements of them or their lives) gets more complex as they age. We talked about children refusing to be photographed or hiding from the camera, we talked about surreptitiously taking images for the sake of art. The internal and external struggles between the need to make work and take particular images and the need to respect our children’s privacy. We hope that with more time and space for these types of conversations to happen, hopefully, women will feel better supported to make the challenging work needed and to show the many ways that parenthood and maternal aesthetics inform artistic practice and are also shaped by it.
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