Mom Residency Highlights Artist Jessica Soininen-Eddis

Contemporary visual artist Jessica Soininen-Eddis .

Today we would love to highlight our first MOM Art Annex Resident for the beginning of summer 2021, the absolutely amazing and wonderful returning resident Jessica Soininen-Eddis. MOM was ecstatic to once again open up our residency program as things began to slowly open here in the U.S.A. We could not have asked to start off on a better note after having Jessica return to continue her artistic practice at our museum and provide us with another wonderful gift. Stay tuned as below she allows us to learn about her creative process and discusses her artistic trajectory in reference to our new artwork by her in our collection.

Depicted above, Jessica’s Prior work for MOM.

Those of you who keep up with us regularly on our social media channels know about this talented artist and the previous piece of work which she gifted us in her earlier spring residency while she was here in 2018 – a beautiful mid-century modern chair painted with her own art vision, which is on view at our museum when we reopen for tours. In Soininen-Eddis’s second residency, she continued to expand on a body of work in which she painted botanical subject matter on top of her daughter’s old garments. Additionally, Founder and Director of M.O.M. Martha Joy Rose suggested she paint on a couch that was available to pair with the chair she previously painted. For the couch, Soininen-Eddis wanted to create a more overt depiction of the female form at its core. Therefore, she decided the specific part of the female form she would focus on depicting would be the vulva.

Though for some of us, this may seem a daunting task, Soininen-Eddis was up for the challenge. She has much experience in creating artworks related to the body, as she has done so since her undergraduate studies at Rhode Island School for Design (RISD). When asked about her artistic trajectory, she specifically referenced her time in Rome, Italy as part of RISD’s European Honors Program. While there, she created a piece of wearable art. In the mixed-media piece, she constructed breasts from hand-sewn bubble wrap, wax, and flour. Each individual breast was able to be snapped on and off of the garment, as her thoughts at the time when developing it were “What’s the big deal? Grandmothers, mothers, sisters have them.”  Such rationalization led her to the conclusion that the same could be said for vulvas.

Though considered a taboo in the not so recent past, vulvas, and other overt physical attributes of what define women and fundamental components of women’s sexuality commingle in many cross-cultural forms of female-centered art. Depictions show direct and indirect representations of the female associated with sensuality of the female form, fertility, the power of women, temptations of the female form-the list goes on. Despite this fact, the female form in and of itself, has standard physical attributes that women have, and Soininen-Eddis wanted to celebrate the form as seen in her work Lost In the Folds (seen below). In recounting her process, Soininen-Eddis admitted that though she has painted numerous womb implied artworks with a central core before, this was the first time she had painted an anatomically correct vulva. The couch itself follows the artistic lineage of Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party. Soininen-Eddis is proud to have created this work for exhibition at the Museum of Motherhood, to share it with her daughter and hopeful that students who care about women’s rights as human rights and gender studies will take something special from its creation.

Lost In the Folds, by Jessica Soininen-Eddis for The Museum of Motherhood

More info on Jessica Soininen-Eddis

In her current artistic practice, she uses worn items of feminine clothing, both her’s and her daughter’s, and then pastes them into her paintings. Soininen-Eddis applies many layers of paint to these fabric pieces so that the fabric becomes sculptural. The clothes are no longer pieces of fashion. They are now relics, which hint at the past even if it is a recent past. Garments, lingerie, intimate pieces of apparel, children’s pajamas and dresses float around flowers and botany. The flowers, just like the items of clothing, reference sensuality. When she collages paper, it covers the page just as cloth to the body. Bodily shapes and lyrical gestures commingle in her paintings and works on paper. Jessica Soininen-Eddis is a contemporary visual artist living and working outside New York City in Northern Westchester County. Soininen-Eddis received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting from Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in Providence, RI. While there, she was selected to study abroad as part of RISD’s European Honors Program, and spent the year living, studying and making art in Rome. Soininen-Eddis also received her Master of Fine Arts in painting and drawing from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. To learn more about Jessica and her incredible art, please check out this link to her personal website: https://bit.ly/3fQi5yT 

Also be sure to follow her on Instagram: @jsoininen_eddis

If you are interested in applying for a residency here at MOM, please go to our website HERE: https://bit.ly/3uRgugm  to find out more. BE SURE TO HURRY! Spots have been filling FAST! We hope that future tours of the space will be available soon, but they are by appointment only in Artist Enclave Historic Kenwood: “where art lives.”

M.A.M.A. Issue 47: Henny Burnett & Sarah Freligh w/Procreate and MER

Henny Burnett: I am a mixed media artist working mainly in sculpture and installation using a range of techniques that include casting, assemblage, photography, projections & sound. My practice is about the domestic and every day, and the stories of the objects around us – in both our homes and museums. Collecting, collating, documenting and display are key elements in my work as is repetition. I am interested in the dynamics of opposites: domestic and industrial, beautiful and ugly, useful and useless, temporary or permanent. My process has resulted in work that explores the fragility of memory; is rooted in the fabric of the home, yet presented in a historical context.

365 Days of Plastic (2020-2021) – (short version)

365 Days of Plastic is an installation and sculpture that is cast in pink dental plaster. It demonstrates one year’s worth of plastic food packaging from a single household, which is both simultaneously beautiful and horrific. This is a disturbing view of one typical family’s environmental impact. The work plays with the ambiguity of outcome and interpretation – domestic and industrial, beautiful and ugly, useful and useless.

Cast dental plaster. 3 m x 4 m.

Jim Poyner Photography,

https://www.axisweb.org/p/hennyburnett/

https://www.instagram.com/hennyburnett/


Snow Baby

by Sarah Freligh

Her girl is disappearing, erased daily by the wan heat of a January sun. Her cold only child, the daughter she palmed into life out of snow and hope after the others were wrung out of her, little white dishrags. Afterward, the white space where she’d been stranded. Every day a blizzard in her brain, a windowless room until she flexed her fingers and built her girl. Please come inside, her husband begs her nightly. But no, not yet. Here is a pink hat, daughter. Can you see how I’m trying to save you?

Sarah Freligh is the author of Sad Math, winner of the 2014 Moon City Press Poetry Prize and the 2015 Whirling Prize from the University of Indianapolis. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Sun Magazine, SmokeLong Quarterly, Cincinnati Review and in the anthology New Microfiction: Exceptionally Short Stories (W.W. Norton, 2018). She was the recipient of a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2009.From MER 17 (2019). Marjorie Tesser, Editor-in-Chief.

Bitch In The House – Has Anything Changed?

By Violet Phillips

Cathi Hanauer is an author in Northampton, Massachusetts who graduated from Syracuse University. During college, she double majored in magazine journalism and literature, and graduated with magna cum laude and phi beta kappa honors, after winning a journalism award and interning for Seventeen. She’s since written articles for the New York Times, the Washington Post, Elle, O, Real  Simple, and Glamour, was formally the books columnist for Glamour and Mademoiselle, and the relationships advice columnist for Seventeen and nexttribe.com and has taught at The New School and the University of Arizona. [1]

Her essay collection, The Bitch in the house, is about women’s frustration with marriage and motherhood. The women whose writing was included are not unusual. According to CNN::

“46% of moms get irate with their husbands once a week or more. Those with kids younger than 1 are even more likely to be mad that often (54 percent). About half of the moms describe their anger as intense but passing; 1 in 10 say it’s “deep and long-lasting.”

44% of mothers feel like the fathers aren’t aware of chores and childcare tasks that need to be done and are poor at multitasking. [2] other common problems are men paying more attention to their mothers than to their wofes, expecting their wives to take care of all responsibilities, being messy and thinking housework isn’t their job, not communicating their feelings and obsessing over sports. [3]

Often, women accept those types of circumstances and do the work with no complaint. According toTIME:

“In 1994, sociologists Mary Clare Lennon and Sarah Rosenfield looked at the time diaries of working women and their husbands, as well as individual reports on both individuals’ feelings about the distribution of labor in their homes. They found that the men who performed 36% of their household’s labor reported the strongest feelings of fairness. But the women who were most likely to say the arrangements were fair expected men to do even less: their time diaries attested to the fact that they were doing 66% of their household’s labor. Lennon and Rosenfield wrote, “both women and men appear to believe that women should do about two-thirds of the household chores.””[4]

This might be because marketing and media images have, increasingly, began to show mothers as blissful and selfless, and women feel pressured to go along with it, but that increasingly appears to not be the case. As life coach and writer Beth Berry says:

“Motherhood heavily engages some aspects of who we are, while leaving almost no room for the growth of other, equally essential parts. Unless we’re aware of the need to balance this out outside of motherhood (and can manage to find the time and support to pull that off), wholeness and thriving can feel quite elusive.”

She also points out that postpartum care can be disappointing. Women often don’t make enough money to raise kids the way they’d like to and extended family members tend to not be as helpful as you might hope. Moms feel the pressure to fight against aging and the media and marketing are constantly working against mothers. [5]

The statistics are predictably grim. According to TIME:

“A survey of 913 mothers commissioned by TIME and conducted by SurveyMonkey Audience found that half of all new mothers had experienced regret, shame, guilt or anger, mostly due to unexpected complications and lack of support. More than 70% felt pressured to do things a certain way. More than half said a natural birth was extremely or very important, yet 43% wound up needing drugs or an epidural, and 22% had unplanned C-sections. Breastfeeding, too, proved a greater challenge than anticipated. Out of the 20% who planned to breastfeed for at least a year, fewer than half actually did.” [6]

Even though it might seem like the current generation has more freedom than past mothers, many millennial women disagree.  As editor EJ Dickinson says:

“Even in an era when shifts in gender and social norms are the norm, we are still limited by a culture that stubbornly refuses to make space for all of our dreams. No matter how many advanced degrees we earn, no matter how many bad men we replace with supportive and nurturing partners, and no matter how strong and self-sufficient we are, millennial women are still forced to decide between deeply dissatisfying options. Choose motherhood over work, and we lose out on the self-empowerment, personal fulfillment, and financial independence a career affords; choose work over motherhood, and we lose an experience that could give our lives new color and dimension and meaning; try to have both, and we end up embittered and exhausted, operating on half-empty at all times.”[7]

Author Meaghan O’Connell goes so far as to argue that oppression starts with the idea of mothers:

“It was so stark to me, honestly. I was a gender studies major, I was a feminist in high school, I wasn’t one of those people who was thirty-five and hadn’t considered myself a feminist. But I really found myself breastfeeding all the time and thinking, this is why women are oppressed. I figured it out, in this visceral way that was undeniable to me, and an inconvenient reality. You can’t be stuck on a couch feeding your baby around the clock and not thinking about this. I mean, I guess people do. I just remembered this, I was running around the track, my boobs were full of milk, and and I knew I had to be home soon, and I was like, this is it, this is the core of all of it. If women didn’t give birth, we would probably be equal.” [8]

Being a stepmother can bring even more discrimination and discontement. Blogger Jamie Scrimgeour bemoans: “The stigma in our society, the challenge of finding your place in a family that was created before you were even a thought, finding your place with your stepkids, the ex, extended family. The list of challenges is exhausting, especially if you’ve found yourself in a high conflict co-parenting relationship.”[9{

But, there are easy ways motherhood can be improved. According to psychology today:

“Support from friends and family help new mothers deal better with stress, and this has been proven to help mothers see their children in a more positive light. Mother’s who have the help of people they trust feel more self-esteem, confidence as a parent, and struggle less to access information that helps them problem-solve for their bundle of joy.” [10]

It seems as if social support would improve the lives of Cathy Haneur and other writers who’ve spoken out about being angry over motherhood and wifehood not living up to their expectations.

Editor’s note: Each month as part of MOM’s ongoing remote internship initiative, Violet Phillips puts pen to paper to review books from our library. Her most recent submission is detailed here. The editor’s thoughts are as follows: While social support appears to improve women’s feelings about motherhood, COVID has made life especially difficult to navigate. Not just for mothers, but for everyone. Recent articles indicate that the fundamental challenges for women who are mothers remain fundamentally unchanged with or without this setback from the ongoing pandemic. A recent New York Times article, ‘This Is a Primal Scream‘, depicts the frustration of America’s maternal mental health crisis, as does this article by Kimberly Seals Allers in the Washington Post titled ‘Female Rage is All The Rage‘ (2018). Cathi Hanauer and friends have an updated version of this book called The Bitch Is Back: Getting Older, Wiser, and Happier, which is nice to hear– but, this editor, deep in the trenches of motherhood asserts, there is still plenty of work to do! The original Bitch in the House is part of MOM’s library. (Martha Joy Rose, 2021).

Sources

[1] cathihanauer.com online. Accessed April 22, 2021.

[2] cnn. “Why we get mad at our husbands.” Martha brockenbrough and parenting.com 7:47 am est, November 29, 2011. Online. Accessed April 22, 2021.

[3] divorcedmoms.com “9 martial problems only women face.” January 21, 2020. Jolie Warren. Online. Accessed April 22, 2021.

[4] time. “Too often, working mothers do far more of the childcare than their husbands. Here’s how to fix that.” Darcy lockman. May 16, 2019. Online. Accessed April24, 2021.

[5] Beth berry revolution from home. “Why modern-day motherhood feels so fusterati g.” January 16, 2018. Onomatopoeic ne. Acessed April 24, 2021.

[6] time. “Motherhood is hard to get wrong. So why do so many moms feel bad about themselves?” Claire howorth. October 19, 2017. Online. Accessed April 24, 2021.

[7] bustle. “Let’s talk about why so many young women are convinced motherhood is going to suck.” Ej Dickson. March 30, 2018. Online. Accessed April 34, 2021.

[8] electric lit reading into everything. “Meaghan O’Connell thinks motherhood is what keeps women oppressed.” March 29, 2018. Becca s huh. Online. Accessed April 24, 2021.

[9] Jamie scrimgeour. “What makes being a stepmom so damn hard.” November 21, 2091. Jamie scrimgeour. Online. Accessed April 24, 20121.

[10] psychology today. “New moms need social support.” January 13, 2013. Online. Accessed April 24, 2021.

M.A.M.A. Issue 45: Rubiane Maia

April 2021: Art and words by Rubiane Maia

Procreate Project, the Museum of Motherhood and the Mom Egg Review are pleased to announce the 45th edition of this scholarly discourse. Literature intersects with art to explore the wonder and the challenges of motherhood. Using words and art to connect new pathways between the academic, the para-academic, the digital and the real, as well as the everyday: wherever you live, work and play, the Art of Motherhood is made manifest. #JoinMAMA #artandmotherhood

For the last three years, I have been investigating the concept of memory and its resonances in our way of existing. More specifically, focusing on the philosophy of Time proposed by Henri Bergson, which affirms memory as duration. In other words, it deals in depth with the subjective time that implies the continuous relationship between our consciousness and the world. This means that our consciousness (which is also memory) is not linear, as it is constituted on the indivisibility of past and present. In Bergson’s words, ‘duration is the continuous progress of the past that gnaws the future and swells as it progresses’. In my opinion, this sentence precisely confirms  the hypothesis that memory cannot be configured as a drawer where remembrances are saved, because as the past is preserved by itself as a virtuality that coexists with us, it accompanies us entirely: each one of us is the condensation of the history lived since birth – and even before it.

DISSOLUTIONS

our bodies inhabit landscapes

even on mainland, 

we follow the speed of the fish 

arms take the form of dorsal fins 

legs, tails

we are submerged, 

drunk with salt water, contradictions and algorithms 

our scaly skin burns, stings 

it is true that not all parts of the body fit together – – 

becoming-creature, becoming-noise, becoming-mud 

the ocean is full of mythologies 

hybrid beings,

bird fishes, jellyfishes, hammerhead sharks 

in the middle east, 

mermaids are goddesses of the sea, of vegetation and rain – – 

they smell of dew

in some places in Africa, 

they are stormy forces that mobilize the energy of creation

Mameto – Dandá – Kianda – –

Dandalunda, mãe-d’água, Odoyá! 

our bodies not only inhabit,

they breath the landscapes

turbulent waters,

urine – giant waves – undertow – –

my fins fold in different directions at the same time

unlike fish, i have lungs:

two spongy cones that I use  to filter the air

yes, i breathe,

i, us, the fishes and some other creatures

we breathe, even against our desire

involuntary act,

first and last movement of the life

vortex between birth and death

a gentle breeze comes in through the nostril,

fills the chest,

activates the diaphragm,

moves your tongue,

vibrates

thus, the voice is born

from voice to song, from song to word, from word to scream

our bodies not only breathe, 

they become landscapes

from each breath a mountain emerges, 

hills – dunes – stones  – – 

presence

organs are territories, 

complex systems, regions 

they make mazes and borders 

they form valleys, subtle surfaces, rivers and lakes

every mouth is an abyss, 

an endless hole

rough skin, dry leaf 

dark eyes, fissures 

anus, tunnel 

blood, current 

sweat, combustion. 

sneeze, storm 

feet, roots 

bones, architecture 

breath, gust of warm wind

body-landscape 

landscaped bodies

we inhale, suspend, count to five 

we exhale, suspend, count to four 

we inhale, suspend, count to three

silence 

we count to two, expand

one

i am breathing as someone that turn the key, 

shifting worlds to open and close the body

physical, mental, emotional,

rupture – interference – happening – – 

action that operates in the invisible, 

in a constant process of variation 

difference

breathing is to metabolize, 

dissolving all forms, segments, rules, institutions. 

breathing is channeling, 

an offer from you to you – sensitive laboratory – –

an unpredictable device

vivid dreams

sigh

* Photographs by Manuel Vason

More about Rubiane:

Rubiane Maia is a Brazilian visual artist based between Folkestone, UK and Vitoria, Brazil. She completed a degree in Visual Arts and a Master degree in Institutional Psychology at Federal University of Espírito Santo, Brazil. Her artwork is an hybrid practice across performance, video, installation and text, occasionally flirting with drawing and collage. She is attracted by states of synergy, encompassing the invisible relationships of affect and flux, and investigates the body in order to amplify the possibilities of perception beyond the habitual. By doing so, she is constantly re-elaborating her personal notion of existential territories (spatial, temporal, cognitive, social and political). More recently, she has been researching the concept of memory and its relationship with language and the phenomena of incorporation [embodiment], often making use of personal narratives as a device for action and resilience.

In 2014/15 she received a scholarship at the Atelier in Visual Arts of the Secretary of Culture of Espírito Santo, she launched the book ‘Self Portrait in Footnotes’ and participated in the exhibition ‘Modos de Usar’ at the Museu de Arte of Espírito Santo. In 2015, she took part at the workshop ‘Cleaning the House’ with Marina Abramovic and participated at the exhibition ‘Terra Comunal – Marina Abramovic + MAI’, at SESC Pompéia, São Paulo with the long durational performance ‘The Garden’ (2 months). In the same year, she produced her first short film ‘EVO’ that premiered at the 26th Festival Internacional de São Paulo and 22nd Festival de Cinema de Vitória. In 2016, she worked on the project titled ‘Preparation for Aerial Exercise, the Desert and the Mountain’ which required her to travel to high landscapes of Uyuni (Bolivia), Pico da Bandeira (Espírito Santo/Minas Gerais, BRA) and Monte Roraima (Roraima, BRA/Santa Helena de Uyarén, VEN). In the same year she completed her second short film titled ‘ÁDITO’. Since 2018 she has been working on the creation of a ‘Book-Performance’, a series of actions devised in response to specific autobiographical texts particularly influenced by personal experiences of racism and misogyny.