It’s a sunny morning in Bristol and I’m looking at a biological clock. Not my own metaphorical one, but a real one: an hourglass in the shape of two uteruses, complete with fallopian tubes. The sand has collected at the bottom: time is up. The work is by New York artist Lea Cetera, titled You Can’t Have It All. I give a wry smile.
It is part of Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood, a major group exhibition by Hayward Gallery Touring, currently at the Arnolfini Gallery, which aims to address a historical blind spot when it comes to mothers who are also artists. Years in the making, compiled by Guardian contributor Hettie Judah. To her knowledge, there have been shows about motherhood as an artistic subject, and shows about art made by mothers, but none were about the two intertwined: motherhood as a lived experience and as an engine for creativity.
Much of the work is revealing. Judah searched archives and collections, sometimes discovering a work based on only a cursory reference in a book or scholarly journal. She lifts a sheet protecting a selection of pencil drawings of Canadian artist Heather Spears’ labor and delivery, made in January 1987. In total there were hundreds of drawings: Spears sat with the women as they worked and drew them in real time, for hours, for days, and they are striking for their dynamism and tenderness. I have never seen a baby coronation as an artistic subject.
This also applies to the many pregnant, breastfeeding and naked self-portraits in the exhibition. I expect that visitors, especially mothers, will experience a similar sense of the invisible being laid bare, whether it is Ghislaine Howard’s charcoal rendering of her stretch marks, Camille Henrot’s pumping nude or Catherine Elwes’ close-up filming of her own nursing breasts.
Caroline Walker’s painting of her sister-in-law’s bottles and pumps drying on a dish rack elevates these objects to the status of a canonical still life. “I think they are quite triggering objects for me,” says Walker, who is about to start a new painting of her own breast pumps. “All this paraphernalia. I haven’t had a very successful breastfeeding experience with any of my babies. So there are memories of sitting alone in the middle of the night and pumping milk. They are objects that are imbued with this specific moment.”
After pumping to feed my premature baby, standing in front of such a painting is an emotional and affirming experience. Did painting it help Walker clear some emotions? “I’m very Scottish – ‘keep yourself together and carry on’,” she says. “But I held on to that feeling of guilt, of failure, of my experience that being with a little baby was not quite what I had imagined. I think painting has helped me because painting is something I have confidence in. I took back control of this subject, in this identity that feels much more stable.”
The sometimes cheerful, sometimes poignant subjectivity of many of the works means that visitors are likely to find something that confirms their own experience. Fani Parali’s mixed media work Incubator/Flight commemorates the time her son was in the neonatal intensive care unit. Her fragile drawing of him standing in a steel crib is so effective at evoking the vulnerability of a premature baby that I can’t dwell on it for too long.
In the room dedicated to the loss of babies, works about personal experiences with fertility treatments, abortion and forced adoption are very moving. Su Richardson’s Heartstrings (What Becomes of the Broken Hearted?) includes a bib and a birthday card given to her by a friend who had been pregnant as a schoolgirl in 1967 and had to give up her baby. The card says: “1 today wherever you are, mom”.
The core of the exhibition – ‘the temple’, as Judah calls it – has walls of vibrant blue and is devoted to interpretations and subversions of the Madonna and Child, which take the form of a series of stunning self-portraits. Jai Chuhan’s large canvas, a nude of herself as an exhausted mother, painting herself as a younger, pregnant woman with her daughter playing next to her, depicts the tension inherent in the overlapping identities of artist and mother. It was painted in 1995 and although the Arts Council immediately bought the work, Chuhan says she was reluctant to do so. “I just didn’t think there would be any interest in the subject,” she says. “Sometimes, when you are also a mother [as an artist]people don’t take you seriously.
Chuhan once met Judy Chicago after she gave a lecture at her university. “She was very inspiring because she said: if you want to go further, you have to shout. Okay, I said. What if you have children? “Oh no, no,” she said, “you can’t have children if you’re an artist.” So I said, what if you only had one? So she said, ‘Yes, okay, one is okay’.”
The void in the canon where the work of artist mothers should be is then not simply a story of men erasing women, but of a division within feminism. “It seemed very urgent that there should be some kind of art history of motherhood, in which it would be presented as an important subject for art,” says Judah. “But on the other hand, these topics have been explored by artists of previous generations, but even in feminist art history, much of this work has not been written about. Domesticity was seen as a trap. [Mother artists] fought against the other women who said, ‘You can’t be an artist’.”
Many female artists with caring responsibilities use the home space as a studio out of necessity. That’s why Judah has placed a vintage kitchen table in the part of the exhibition dedicated to ‘maintenance’. It is inspired by Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ Manifesto for Maintenance Art from 1969! which sets out a vision that merges art and the maintenance work that is a large part of life, leading her to exhibit the tasks she undertakes as contemporary art by performing them in a museum.
So many mother artists have had to negotiate the merging of art and life, whether it’s Chuhan showing how she painted alongside her daughter at play, or Marlene Dumas working with her daughter Helena, six, allowing her to complement her drawings with colored paint . Bobby Baker, meanwhile, took an eight-year break from performances and exhibitions after having children, and felt her status as an artist diminish. Her 1983-84 notebook with timed drawings of domestic life is funny and poignant. In a scrawled caption she says: “Never home early enough and always too grumpy.”
Not all works are by women who were artists first and mothers second. For Anna Grevenitis it was the other way around. Her ongoing photography series Regard shows life with her daughter Lulu, who has Down syndrome. “My daughter and her disability catapulted me into a very lonely motherhood. A lot of the things we would do were not on the same schedule as all the other kids,” she says. “Photography became my source of therapy, my way of finding myself. Because I was a full-time mother, my subjects became my children. My house became my studio. I just needed to express myself and I didn’t have the time or money. That’s why I just used what was available.”
Her photographs with Lulu capture the nuances of a family’s experience with disability unlike anything I’ve seen before, and yet Grevenitis didn’t see herself as an artist until she was accepted by the public. I ask her why she thinks there is so much interest in work about motherhood, and she connects it to the rise of the memoir in literature. “The art of portraying motherhood sits on that wave. Portraits are basically autobiography. And you will doubt the veracity of your message, asking: am I even allowed to do that? Will people be interested? Should I keep this a secret?”
It took a long time to get to a place where these artistic conversations could be had openly. “There is a new generation of artists who have started talking more publicly about their status as mothers,” says Judah. “To be honest, this has only happened in the last five years.” Walker largely agrees, recalling a meeting with a museum curator after her exhibition at a commercial gallery. “He said, ‘That work would never have hung in that gallery ten years ago.’”
• Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood is at Arnolfini, Bristol until May 26, then Mac in Birmingham (June 22 to September 29), Millennium Gallery, Sheffield (October 24 to January 19) and Dundee Contemporary Arts (Spring 2025 )