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Art MAMA

The Measurement Project & Pregnant With Meaning

The ProCreate Project, the Museum of Motherhood and the Mom Egg Review are pleased to announce the 10th edition of  thisscholarly discourse intersects with the artistic 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

Each day of pregnancy, the artist Sarah Irvin measured her stomach at navel height with a piece of yarn. The Measurement Project is the accumulation of this daily ritual.More about the artist:

Current project-based series is entitled A Bringing Forth, derived from the Latin root of the term post-partum. The work is enabled by and exists within the context of motherhood. In the struggle to reconcile the notion of parenting to my practice, the artist decided that it was the nature of the practice that needed to adapt, not the nature of parenthood.

Sarah established mechanisms to capture the physical actions of parenting as a mark on a page. For instance, the area rugs in the nursery created transfer drawings as she walked across them, the glider rocker created drawings as she and the baby rocked, and the stroller created drawings while strolling.  These works were enabled by the activities of the daily routine and captured the kinetic energy and labor involved in the care and nurturing of an infant. During the second and third months of her daughter’s life, she created a series of watercolors exclusively while she slept, with each set considered complete when she awoke, allowing my circumstances to dictate aspects of my creative output. While breastfeeding, Sarah made drawings on paper created from bed sheets. Looping marks in the drawings corresponded to individual suck and swallow motions of nursing and provided real-time read of the experience. Other iterations of this series include Sarah’s daughter’s nursery as camera obscura; cyanotypes created with her blankets, toys and clothing; silverpoint drawings tracing her early movements made with jewelry from her grandmother; and paintings made with a baby bottle and formula. [More at Procreate Project]

MAMA ISSUE N.11

PREGNANT WITH MEANING
by Anelie Crighton

Pregnancy, as experienced, is not a metaphor, but a challenge: those solid thumps to the ribcage are reminders that much as you might like to think of yourself as a brain on a stick, an intellect tethered to the complex technology that is the body, you are in fact a placental mammal. You need to work? No, you need to nap. You want to stride along like you always did, long straight steps, fast and confident? By week 30 it will be all you can do not to waddle.

My walking mantra is, ‘There is nothing wrong with your legs. There is nothing wrong with your legs.’ This is strictly true. There is, however, something wrong with my feet (swollen), pelvis (slowly disconnecting), lower back (hurting), stomach muscles (stretched), blood pressure (low) and brain (sorry?). My horizons have gradually contracted. My slow pace and ready fatigue make the ten minute tram ride into the centre of town seem the equal of a day-long trek. At home I must intersperse activity with rest, reaching for another glass of iced water while I prop up my comically puffy feet. I feel hot all the time, and am immensely fond of very cold drinks and ice cream. Very cold ice cream drinks are also acceptable.
The tenant has been excellent company. Once his movements were detectable at 22 weeks, his wriggles and stretches and somersaults were delightful. While he still had the room he moved rapidly and erratically, brief flutterings and jabs like the strangest indigestion you’ve ever had. As he’s grown, his reachings have slowed, become more definite, more obviously in response to changes in his environment. Any time I lean forward, a small foot firmly reminds me that he does not appreciate cramped lodgings. I have pointed out that at 5’10” I offer quite spacious accommodation, but the kicks continue.

One day my husband caught a glimpse of me dressing and said in wonder, ‘You look beautiful.’ I found this astonishing; I look like a woman who’s swallowed a basketball, perhaps to distract attention from her thick ankles and dry hair. I have had a protruding belly for months yet still misjudge my movements, my round new boundary regularly encountering table edges and door frames. Numerous sleepless nights have hung a crescent under each eye. The fit of my voluminous maternity pants gets a little more snug each week. There is beauty here?

Observed and observing, one’s progress is constantly at issue – are you gaining weight, feeling worse, sleeping less? Is the baby growing longer and fattening up, does it move ten times an hour twice a day? Once you’ve exhausted the present, the future beckons: that unpredictable day (early? late?) when the contractions begin, and the x hours thereafter when you’ll breathe and relax and finally make up your mind about an epidural. The days to follow with the fragile and confused newborn, the nights of crying and feedings. And just wait ‘til they’re a year old! Or 18 months! Or two years! The early months will feel like years, they say, when they’re not saying it will all go by so fast. Parenting is asynchrony.

What a rude shock this is, this memento corporis, this foregrounding of flesh-and-blood. Our social selves are fundamentally intellectual, personas sprung from the mind which connect through the invisible media of speech and sight. We are our words, our views, our status updates – until pregnancy, when the body reasserts itself. It has a formidable arsenal to bring you down: faintness, fatigue, pain, squeezed lungs: all of these are more than equal to your conviction that you can carry on as though your ballooning midriff is a minor inconvenience. Sure, march up that staircase – just don’t expect to get to the top without puffing like a steam train and feeling dizzy. Keep working or studying, but be ready to embrace synonyms and dead-ends, distraction and sudden blanks. A new patience with yourself is required, a temporary accommodation. Because the fact is, you’re extremely busy. Under the surface you’re assembling genes and cells, connecting neurons and testing muscles. Science-fiction factories of precision parts could only dream of replicating with your efficiency. Pregnancy has evolved from being an accessible miracle, a blessed mystery bestowed upon us by a benevolent creator, to seeming the supreme technological achievement, an inbuilt instruction set of vast complexity which draws millions of parts into just the relation required to produce a new thinking, feeling person. The terminology might have changed, but our awe is the same.

And so the due date looms, and I am working my way through the last chores and warily witnessing what new discomforts my body devises. The pivot-point of birth separates the weeks before, which are trapped beneath a net of plans and appointments and checklists and advice; and the weeks after, nothing but a huge blank, a cute stranger with incoherent needs, a new life for him, for my husband, and for me. A challenge, indeed, which will forever re-balance the relationship between mind and body.

Author Bio: Anelie Crighton is an Australian Arts grad raising her little blonde bundle of energy in Germany who ekes out snippets of time to write between loads of laundry and rounds of raucous baby giggling. anelie.wordpress.com

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Art

MOMENTS OF WEIGHTLESSNESS while WAITING FOR WORDS [Link]

Project: MOMENTS OF WEIGHTLESSNESS
Pianist, inventor and performer Sarah Nicolls developed her unique ‘Inside-Out Piano’ to explore the belly of the instrument and to coax out some of its hidden sounds. In this solo show, she explores the extraordinary unexpected characteristics of the instrument, moving it around the stage to gradually reveal her parallel journey into motherhood. See this monumental piano in surprising motion, hear the beautiful melodies and textures of Sarah’s piano-songs mixed with stories of creativity, and contemplate the moments of life where everything seems to stand still.


About the artist: Sarah Nicolls is a UK-based experimental pianist, at the forefront of innovations in piano performance. She has worked extensively with interactive technologies and invented the ‘Inside-out Piano’, to enable ‘extended’ piano techniques. The second prototype was built in 2014 by Pierre Malbos, Paris.

In the rest of her concert career, Sarah is a frequent soloist, performing in events like the London Design Festival, a recent Wellcome Trust/BBC Radio 3 weekend, the PRSF New Music Biennial and Matthew Herbert’s 20 Pianos project. Sarah has given countless world premieres, is regularly broadcast and features on several CDs. She is a Senior Lecturer at Brunel University, is Artistic Director of the BEAM (Brunel Electronic and Analogue Music) Festival, and curates interactive music exhibitions with ACCORD. Sarah has two children: Stan, born 2012 and Sylvie, born 2013.

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WAITING FOR WORDS

By Cynthia Patton

From Mom Egg Vol. 11 “Mother Tongue”

I was in bed when Katie slipped past, heading for the stairs. My slender, caramel-haired daughter didn’t look at me or speak. She was a shadow, receding with the dawn.

I huddled beneath the down comforter, filled with foggy, nameless emotions. I knew I should go downstairs and engage her as the specialists instructed me. Make good use of our precious free time. With an autistic child there’s always something to work on: social skills, sign language, speech. Instead a prayer rose unbidden. Please give me words. I can do without hugs and kisses, but I need more words, need them like air.

Katie was five yet spoke like a two-year-old—when she spoke at all. A knot lodged between my shoulder blades. What if conversation never came?  Katie was smart enough, but speech remained a challenge. Her mind was a secret garden, the thoughts overflowing with nowhere to go. I wanted to hear her stories, her emotions, her feeble attempts at jokes. I wanted her to look at me, smile, and say Mommy.

I released the breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. My tears rained down as I prayed for the day the words broke free, flooding fallow fields.

Katie was nonverbal for two years, eight months. At three, after a year of intensive therapy, she had a spoken vocabulary of 50 words. By four she used two-word phrases. By five she assembled short sentences.

Special needs parenting is often a strange blend of gratitude, sorrow, pride, and guilt. I was excited and proud when Katie mastered a new sentence. Yet I was sad she had to work so hard and guilty I wanted more. Why couldn’t I simply be grateful? I was, but when I looked in her eyes I saw an IQ boiling, just out of reach, and wanted to smash something on her behalf.

It’s hard to watch your child struggle, especially when there’s nothing to do but wait.

At six Katie answered simple questions. By seven she used adjectives and worked to master possessive pronouns. I fought for additional speech therapy and finally the long, slow slog ended. Her speech gained momentum.

One night shortly after she turned eight, Katie asked for the blue dolphin as she climbed into bed. Her words were crystal clear, so I praised her as the therapists trained me.

She asked again, and I showed her the blue cat.

“No,” she said. “Want dolphin please.”

“We don’t have a dolphin.”

“Dolphins swim in the water.”

“You’re right,” I said. “They’re good swimmers.”

I reached into the basket that contained her stuffed animals. “Do you want the lobster?”

Katie smiled and reached for the toy. She played with the pinchers while I felt smug about discovering the glitch where her brain veered off course.

She looked up. “This is red. Red lobster.”

“I know, but it lives in the water.”

Her pained look said I was the one with the neurological problem. “I want blue dolphin.”

She clenched her teeth—the beginning of a tantrum. I thought fast. “Why don’t you pick the animal you want to sleep with?”

This wasn’t the routine. After a long pause she rolled out of bed, rooted in the basket, and yanked something out. I laughed when I saw Eeyore. “That’s not a dolphin. It’s a donkey.”

“Blue donkey,” she said, climbing into bed.

Katie knows the difference between a dolphin and a donkey. Sometimes her brain scrambles the words.

We recited Goodnight Moon while Katie stroked Eeyore’s ears. I said, “I love you” as my hand automatically made the sign.

She signed I love you as Max, our cat, entered the room. “Good night, sweetie. Max says good night too.”

“Goodnight, Mommy.”

I froze, unsure I’d heard correctly. Katie had never spontaneously greeted anyone. She could say the words, but I needed to coax them out.

Max meowed, and Katie giggled. “Good talking, Max.”

She’d done it, twice in one night. I wanted to cry and shout and jump on the bed.

So what if it happened a few years late? So what if it wouldn’t happen again for months?

These moments sustain me.

A few months later, I was reading yet another progress report. Katie was in the kitchen studying cookbook photos. “That’s soup. Soup is hot. I like soup. Soup is good. I can make it. I’m stirring soup. Let’s make chicken tortilla soup.”

She flipped the page and talked about pumpkin pie. I didn’t know she knew what pumpkin pie was. More pages flipped, followed by a long discourse on chocolate cake, then meat, then pasta, then salad with cranberries. It was as if she wanted to say every sentence she could that included the particular food item.

To say I was stunned would be an understatement.

It went on for 15 minutes, maybe longer.

I listened as the words poured out, barely breathing. Then it hit me. This was it, the moment I’d been waiting for. The words were breaking free, spilling into the kitchen and filling up the room.

They filled me up. Better than any meal.

Cynthia Patton is an award-winning author, speaker, advocate, and attorney, and  founder of Autism A to Z, a nonprofit organization.

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Art Featured MAMA

This is Where I Am and Mirror Mirror [Click]

 

 ‘This is where I am’ (2013) is part of the M.A.M.A. – Mothers Are Making Art initiative. Read More by Clicking Here.

‘This is where I am’ is based on ideas of Transactional Analysis (TA), a theory of behaviour that emphasiseshow our adult behavioural patterns originate in childhood.  The theory describes three ego states (Parent/Adult/Child);

Parent is a state in which people behave, feel, and think in response to an unconscious mimicking of how their parents acted, or how they interpreted their parent’s actions.

Adult is a state of the ego in which we process information and make predictions absent of major emotions. While a person is in the Adult ego state, he/she is directed towards an objective appraisal of reality.

Child is a state in which people behave, feel and think similarly to how they did in childhood. The Child is the source of emotions, creation, recreation, spontaneity and intimacy.

The aim of change under TA is to free ourselves from our childhood scripts and move toward constructive problem solving as opposed to avoidance or passivity.

Inspired by observations of my daughter learning to walk and reflections on my personal ego-states led to the performance ‘This is where I am’.  This was a durational performance working with two focal points: The Wall (a symbolic anchor for the Parent) and The Floor (a symbolic anchor for The Child). I am slowly walking between both for two hours, falling on the floor and picking myself up again, then trying to hug the wall. Using chalk (favourite childhood material) I carefully outline as much of my body as my position would allow me each time. The physical and emotional difficulty of this performance is unexpected.  

About the Artist: Nuša Pavko

Born in 1978 in former Yugoslavia, Nuša graduated in sculpture and ceramics at Famul Stuart school of Applied Arts in Ljubljana in 2005.  Also a qualified and practicing social worker, Nuša combined her twin interests in art and society in her Sociology MSc which considered the therapeutic value of postmodern ‘death art’ in 2010.

Primarily interested in performance art and installations, Nuša draws inspiration from a wide range of sources but regardless of the form, her artistic work could be considered as some type of ‘social commentary’ as it is often inspired by people and events in her vicinity.

Nuša has been living and working in London for nearly a decade and has a small ceramics studio in her home. Most recently, she has been producing artworks with her little assistant.

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Mirror Mirror by Sandra Ramos Obriant

Originally published in Mom Egg Vol. 10 The Body

My mother told me I was beautiful. She was always saying stuff like that, telling me what a gorgeous baby I was, and how I’d won a Beautiful Baby contest and had my picture printed in a calendar. January was my month. She compared me to movie stars, and in high school tried to draw me out of a nerdy adolescence by telling me that I had sex appeal, an important item in her lexicon of female virtues. She never explained how to use that gift, but encouraged me to date.

One night, we watched an old Ava Gardner movie together — The Barefoot Contessa. I sat on the end of her bed and brushed my long hair, my head tilted to the side. She must have been watching me. “Your neck is the same as Ava Gardner’s,” she said. I looked at Ava, seductive in a gypsy dance, and couldn’t get past the cleft in her chin and the valley between her breasts.

“No, it’s not,” I said, more harshly than I intended.

We watched Jane Fonda in Barbarella together. “You look like Jane Fonda,” she said. My hair was lighter then, and laden with curls, like Jane’s.

“No, I don’t,” I said, and walked out of the room.

Many years later, my son was two years old and I still looked pregnant. “I’m too fat,” I told my mother.

“You’re beautiful,” she said with conviction, and looked at me with appraising eyes from my top to my round bottom. “You look like Jacqueline Bisset, only she’s too skinny.”

“I do?” I said, and studied my profile in the mirror.

My son’s in college now, and I still look pregnant. But I carry an image of myself that defies logic. I pass a mirror in my house, and out of the corner of my eye see a stranger. Who’s that matronly woman, shoulders slouched and with a crease between her eyebrows? I stop to examine my reflection, and a slow morph occurs. Straighten the shoulders, suck in my gut, and smile, and yes, there she is. Yes, tilt my head — yes, I still have it — Ava Gardner’s neck. The same.

About the Author: Sandra Ramos O’Briant’s work has appeared in Café Irreal, Flashquake, riverbabble, In Posse, LiteraryMama, Whistling Shade, La Herencia, latinola.com, and The Copperfield Review. In addition, her short stories have been anthologized in Best Lesbian Love Stories of 2004, What Wildness is This: Women Write About the Southwest (University of Texas Press, Spring 2007), Latinos in Lotus Land: An Anthology of Contemporary Southern California Literature, (Bilingual Press, 2008), Hit List: The Best of Latino Mystery (Arte Publico (2009), and The Mom Egg (Half Shell Press, 2010). Read her work at http://www.thesandovalsisters.com and http://www.bloodmother.com.

 

 

Categories
Art MAMA

M.A.M.A. – Mothers Are Making Art [CLICK]

ART: Sabrina Mahfouz
Sabrina is currently the Poet in Residence for Cape Farewell, an organization that provides a cultural response to climate change. She is an Associate Artist alumni at the Bush Theatre in London; a Writer at Liberty for the UK civil rights charity LIBERTY and the Creative Director of poetry production company P.O.P.

She is a World Economic Forum Global Shaper on the executive board of the London hub. Sabrina studied at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, receiving her MA in International Politics and Diplomacy and at King’s College, University of London, receiving her BA (Hons) in Classics and English Literature.

Her creative work has been recognized with a number of awards.  Most recently, these include receiving a 2014 Fringe First Award; the 2013 Sky Arts Futures Fund Award; an Old Vic New Voices Underbelly Edinburgh Award; a UK Young Artists Award; The Stage Award for Best Solo Performance 2011 nomination; an Old Vic New Voices TS Eliot Award and a Westminster Prize for New Playwrights. Her first book, The Clean Collection, is available from Bloomsbury.
Read more at ProCreate Project/ Link is HERE.MAMA ISSUE 6

TEXT: Autumn Stephens

Originally published in Mom Egg Review Vol. 13 – History of a Girl

A blue cloud aureoles her hair, making her a madonna or hinting at the moment a smidge past perfection when petals begin their downward drift.

Labor Day

Without the children, she is left with too much fruit. Three platters on the drainboard, their chips and cracks mitigated by heaps of peaches, nectarines, plums. The sweet stones she dreamed of all winter, like Demeter, like her own mother, mourning loss of fragrance, sipping boiling water for comfort, reaching back toward a hotter life.

Spoiler

In the movie the children die. She should have chosen a different show, some summer trifle where the men are sex fools and the women are goddesses, sassy but forgiving. Read More….

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Art Birth MAMA

Reflections Of A Multicultural Mom

Art by Louise Camrass
Art by Louise Camrass

By Margaret Rapp

From Mom Egg Review Vol. 13

On my son’s third birthday, he got chicken pox. We cancelled his party, but I still gave him the present he most wanted – a Barbie doll. Although I am a “modern” Mom, I was a little uncomfortable giving him a Barbie, so I gave him a Barbie and Ken; and, since he is an inter-racial child and I wanted to be politically correct, I gave him a black Barbie and Ken (although Barbie did have a blonde streak in her hair). My son loved his gift and I can still see him, sitting in front of his cake with a birthday hat on, his face speckled with pox marks, holding up his Barbie (Ken had already been relegated to the unused toy box).

For the next two weeks, while he was recuperating, Barbie was his constant companion. When he went back to daycare, he wanted to take his Barbie for show and tell. While I had my misgivings on how the other children would react –would they make fun of him—I stuck to my feminist principles and didn’t discourage him. That afternoon when he came home, he threw his Barbie angrily in the corner. My first thought was that he had been teased or called a sissy. Then he tearfully said the words that are still imprinted in my mind. “I want a white Barbie.” He had never used the word white to refer to a person before. Years later, I learned that it was actually Jessie, a black girl who lived down the block, that had taunted him about his “black” Barbie.

I hate the word “bi”. Like in I am the mother of a biracial child. I keep expecting to see a child that is painted black on one side and white on the other like those mimes you see in the park standing like statues. It comes from that puritanical Calvinism where everything in America is bifurcated, cut in half, polarized. Like either/or, good/evil, black/white. And you are always expected to come down on one side or the other.

Murphy Brown was very big on TV when my son was small. After his Dad took off, I played the Murphy Brown role – the fast talking, independent woman who raised a child on her own. It worked very well until they found out I had a mixed race child. Even then, it could work if they thought he was adopted. Once they found out I had him the old fashioned way, I was relegated to the welfare Mom role –the woman who was too stupid to keep her legs together and was dumped when she got pregnant.

I know that my son has spent much of his childhood longing for some traditional nuclear family that he will never have (as do many children from both black and white homes). But our society is much more multicultural now than it was when my son was born twenty-six years ago. These days he self identifies as a German Haitian Dominican Jew. And we do have a “biracial” President.

My son is grown now – a muscled young man with light golden skin, deep dark eyes and the somewhat rounded features that compliment his dimpled smile. His dark curly hair is slowly turning into male patterned baldness — a trait which I find attractive but I suspect he is embarrassed by as he has taken to wearing a hat. He lives with a friend in Harlem and writes lyrics for a pop singer that plays the small downtown clubs. Like most starving artists, he walks dogs to pay the rent, It is hard to believe that he is actually a grown man who has to lean down to hug me instead of looking up at me. So why am I still so worried?

Sunday afternoon a couple of years ago, my son called me from the police station. He was picked up at 6am in Harlem in front of his house. When he protested that he had rights, he was arrested. After two days he was released. He spent two days in jail, lost two days work for which he was not paid, his only good winter jacket was torn when he was roughed up and he saw a homeless man beaten down by police while he was in the holding cell.

The particulars of why he was arrested aren’t important. The charges were dropped, the judge apologized. His legal aid attorney told him he should file charges for false arrest. He made some halfhearted noises about filing charges, but never followed through. He seemed defeated by the whole experience. When I told people what happened, indignant at my son’s mistreatment, the first question they asked was what did he do wrong? After a while, I kept quiet about it, ashamed that he had been arrested. I began to believe he had done something wrong. And I wondered if he would have been arrested if he had been white.

Two months ago he told me he was frisked again in the same neighborhood on his way to work. This time, when the arresting officer “copped an attitude” when he tried to find out the reason he was stopped, he didn’t say anything and let her frisk him because he didn’t want to be late for work. I didn’t know if I was more relieved that he had chosen the pragmatic approach to stay out of jail or saddened that he had learned the lesson society expected him to learn – that he is a second class citizen who knows enough to shut-up and keep his head down. And he was still late for work.

Recently my son told me he was glad that he had been raised in an “alternative” family. He felt that it gave him a more worldly and tolerant outlook on life. What I learned is what it feels like to worry every time my son walks out the door.

About the Author: Margaret Rapp–My life time commitment to feminism and feminist writing is a direct result of my experiences living as a single mom in New York City. I have met many interesting and diverse women I would not have met except for this one commonality and their stories are reflected in my writing. I continue to write short stories and plays for various reading venues in New York, blog on DailyKos and hopefully will get my novel “After the Music Died” published this year. Read more about MER/ Link is HERE

About the Artist: Louise Camrass — Louise was born in London in 1969 and is an artist using paint, charcoal, film/video, clay and performance. Her work charts the human experience. Sex, death, the poetry of our lives. Always responding to the people, places, atmospheres around her, she works with whatever medium suits the moment.
She is currently painting, inspired by the colour and atmosphere of Venice, of memory and times past.
This is also reflected in recent video which expresses the pathos of moving between past and present, the non linear nature of time. Read more at ProCreate Project/ Link is HERE

On becoming a mother from www.louisecamrass.com on Vimeo.

Categories
Art Featured MAMA

M.A.M.A. – Mothers ARE Making Art – New Installation(s)

WHAT: The ProCreate Project, the Museum of Motherhood and the Mom Egg Review are partnering for bi-monthly on-line presentations featuring M.A.M.A. – Mothers are Making Art.
WHEN: The 1st and the 15th of each month words and images will highlight the joy and the challenges of being both a mother and an artist.
WHERE: Online is the place! We will host works of art about mothers and mothers-to-be; featuring academic and creative writing in order to promote women internationally and generate cultural exchanges and opportunities.

WHY: We are determined to explore the extraordinary experiences of mothers and how, by means of channeling these new and powerful energies a person can cultivate both motherhood and art. However, support is needed and awareness must be raised to facilitate this process and to finally empower it.

We strive to give voice to all women, make acceptable room for “feelings,” sensations, and interpretations without judgment; we want to make space for mothers in the arts to display their work and move a conversation about “the art of motherhood” forward. DOWNLOAD THE PRESS RELEASE.

@ProcreateProj  @MOMmuseum @TheMomEgg #JoinMAMA

slide5This month features Lynn Lu (Pictured on homepage and above here) and Beck Tipper, whose writing is highlighted on the M.A.M.A. page here.

Paradoxes for the Virtual collaborative Skype performance with Birgitta Hosea on YouTube [LINK].
Lab451LONDON; Camden Image Gallery; London, UK. 2015
In a game of Exquisite Corpse, Lynn Lu (live) and Birgitta Hosea (projected from SKYPE) explore intimacy and the generation of interpersonal closeness across a virtual divide through a scored series of shared confidences.

-PREGNANCY AND AFTER MOTHERHOOD INSPIRED SEVERAL OF THE LYNN LU PERFORMANCES AND INSTALLATIONS-

Lynn Lu received a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University with a major in Sculpture and a minor in Graphic Design in 1999. In 1998, she studied with Christian Boltanski at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and at the École Marchutz in Aix-en-Provence. She earned her MFA in New Genres at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2002, and completed a PhD program (ABD) at Musashino Art University in Tokyo in 2008, on a full scholarship from the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In 2010 she was awarded the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by the University of Newcastle in Australia.

Since 1997, Lynn has exhibited and performed extensively in the United States, Singapore, Japan, China, Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, Philippines, Indonesia, Cambodia, Australia, New Zealand, UK, France, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Estonia, Poland, Belarus, Czech Republic, Turkey, Greece, Argentina, and Canada.

See more about Lynn at ProcreateProject.com

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Art

Maternal Nest

August 2015; MAMA, ProcreateProject features the art of Kerry Stammers
August 2015; MAMA, ProcreateProject features the art of Kerry Stammers

Kerry Stammers- ‘Maternal Nest’ painting
As part of our ongoing series with Procreate Project, MAMA: mothers are making art announces new works and texts.

According to Kerry, the painting “represents the nesting instinct in pregnancy and the rediscovery of creative ‘playtime’. The background foliage of the nest which is painted are the flowers from my mothers garden where I grew up. Laid on top are the fresh flowers from my own garden as I strive to provide a protective, inspiring enviroment for my son. Hidden amongst the foliage is an old tea set, it is like a prop from my childhood where stories and games were created.”

See also, Barefootbabysteps – ‘Painting with nature’
essentially a childhood pastime, a little hobby to while away the hours in my parents beautiful garden in the Suffolk countryside, It would start with an outdoor adventure,foraging little treasures along the way. At any given moment the shape of a flower or leaf or twig even, would remind me of an animal or character or story. I would stop in my tracks and let a picture organically form on the ground/ tree stump below. There was always something sad yet magical about leaving a little creation behind to get blown away by the wind, or snuffled by a passing hedgehog or squirrel, photography allows me to capture that moment when everything is fresh and newly formed before its componants get whisked back into the circle of life.

Kerry hope the pictures, (along with her recent creations), inspire children and adults alike to look at the world around them with new eyes: explore the outdoors, forage for earthy treasures and unleash their imagination to create new stories and adventures.

More about Kerry and her creations here [LINK]

See new video from Procreate Project’s founder:

Read the accompanying essay this month by Jenny N. “Reflections on Maternal Thinking” here [LINK]. Excerpt below:

In her book, Maternal Thinking, Sara Ruddick defines what she understands to be the concept by this same name. It should be noted that this definition has a social, historical, and cultural context. The vision of maternal thinking, as she perceives it, has come out of our notions of what type of person mothers should be and what role they play in our society. Ruddick states: “The agents of maternal practice, acting in response to the demands of their children, acquire a conceptual scheme – a vocabulary and logic of connections – through which they order and express the values of their practice” (Ruddick 1989). Maternal thinking, she goes on to say, is guided by a mother’s interest in their child’s preservation, growth, and acceptability. Preservation begins whenever the mother reasonably believes her child to be a viable being and continues on through their first years of life. The mother is consumed with protecting her baby during these vulnerable years. Growth occurs following these first few years, when the mother is still entrusted with the child’s protection, but now wishes to see the child grow physically, emotionally, intellectually, and socially. Acceptability refers to a mother’s desire to mold her child into the type of person that is socially accepted. A reflection no doubt of what we value in our society, I once heard a mother remark on the playground, “Why would they not want their kid to be smart and athletic?” More.

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Art Birth Featured

The Art of Motherhood

Since immersing myself in the motherworld in 1989 I have observed the rise in the visibility of humans engaged in the practice of birth and caregiving. This visibility has translated into music, scholarship, literature, theater, and most recently a rise in fine artists lending their passion to making video, photography, paintings, and performance. I am thrilled by this because making the labor, love, and struggles of motherhood visible lends itself to introspection, observation, and contemplation of mother-work, mother-identity, and the ties that bind. Indeed, I feel blessed to have been born exactly at this time and to have been an active participant in this process. As Alana Ruben Free said to me the other day after an especially tedious and frustrating week, “at least we changed the world.” Martha Joy Rose

Please enjoy the beautiful work of Ana Alvarez-Errecalde here [CLICK}

“Birth of My Daughter”

Ana Alvarez-Errecalde
Ana Alvarez-Errecalde
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Art Birth Featured

M.A.M.A. & The Art of Motherhood [CLICK]

The Museum of Motherhood and the ProCreate Project are pleased to announce the launch of a new monthly international
exchange of ideas and art. M.A.M.A. will celebrate the notion of being “pregnant with ideas” in new ways. This scholarly discourse intersects with the artistic 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

Gravidus for MOM
GRAVIDUS is a series of works instigated during the artist’s recent pregnancy whilst completing her MA in Art & Design at the School of Art in Birmingham. Inspired by the mould-making process, these works indirectly reference the changing bodily state during pregnancy.

The focus on process and manufacture plays a significant role in both the production of the work and its inherent meaning. Moulds contain both positive and negative forms within a singular, symbiotic unit; as objects of function, they are often overlooked and discarded during the casting process.

In GRAVIDUS I and II, the ‘mould’ captures the action of making within its internal space; whilst its large, solid outer form becomes an almost defensive structure. As the artist’s pregnancy progressed, the work changed in proportion, scale and use of material so that it references rather than simply depicts a stage in the mould-making process. By removing them from a purely functional role, the ‘mould’ is now elevated to the status of the casts they would once create. Utilising plaster and concrete as the main sculptural materials and wood and steel for the work’s display reflects their traditional and continuous usage within construction, architecture and sculpture due to their physical properties of solidity and resilience.

In GRAVIDUS, this enduring presence symbolises the universality of pregnancy, whilst the material strength reflects the personal feelings surrounding the relationship of female artists and the changing roles they come to inhabit.

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Please go directly to the Procreate Project for more about the art of Claire Hickey and to celebrate this new international exchange between M.O.M. and the Procreate Project. Go to our M.A.M.A. link to read the featured article each month.