Ideas of space making I was struck recently by seeing an image of Barbara Hepworth smiling as she holds her toddler, while her triplets sit upright in large generous prams and their father, Ben Nicholson, looks on2. Triplets… yet somehow she remained prolific. I had to explore what magic method allowed her the space to make so much and mother so many. Amongst other things, she is said at one time, to have configured her studio so that she could attend to both her children and to her work, embracing the interruptions. In Artist/Mum the conversations all discuss the need to make space, sometimes the struggle to make space for work. They describe the time spent at home with children or young babies as feeling variously precious and pressured. The spaces we inhabit with young children can feel like a retreat, or a ‘shrinking world’, or ‘a mad storm’. Kate Sweeney discusses a need for some ‘unlearning’ to take place, in order to allow the experience of becoming a mum to generate a deeper engagement with practice. This approach opens up opportunities to weave private life and public practice together. Many of the artists have achieved this careful combination and travelled with children in tow to exhibit work or attend residencies. Debbie Bower and Lindsay Duncanson offer interesting models of how to travel, live and make work as a family, stretching the domestic into the working world. It seems that involved partners and support from friends are key to making this approach possible. These experiences of residencies afforded opportunities, not just for practice, but also for ‘learning how to be a family’. It seems that family friendly residencies, spaces or studios, are critical to sustaining practice and need to be woven into the fabric of a better, more inclusive art world system. Changing shapes For many of the Artist/Mums there is a problem with the inherited feminist message, ‘we can do it all’ when clearly we can’t, however admitting that feels like a reproach. At the very least, 2 www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/apr/19/letters-reveal-postnatal-crisis-of-barbara-hepworth
70
