Event, exhibition, Gallery, Live art, maternal, mother artist, Performance, visual art
Desperate Artwives 5th Edition
My visit to the Desperate Artwives Exhibition could not have been more timely as it coincided with the Women’s March organised in London and other major cities in response to Trump’s inauguration and the issues his views raise for women.
The work on show by nineteen professionally trained female artists and created in various media reflects and questions their experiences as wives and mothers. Brought together by Amy Dignam, they all wanted to continue the creative process following childbirth and within the constraints of the domestic environment. The result is a largely autobiographical narrative both depicting and celebrating their personal experiences infused with the domestic.
Jane Helling’s “Sacred Heart Defect” is a display of several small hearts crafted from pretty fabrics softly stuffed to create 3D forms – which appear to be anatomically correct. In doing so she creates a tension between the rather impersonal meaning of anatomical drawings found in medical books and the very personal association of babies’ soft toys usually seen in prams and on play mats. The viewer thereby creates their own narrative – Is this about a precious child born with a heart defect? Instead of being comforting , the soft hearts bring to mind the anxiety experienced by the parent of a sick child – a more personal and poignant image than that of a medical journal. The term “Sacred Heart” for Roman Catholics refers to the heart of Christ and as such is regarded an object of devotion and perhaps here can be interpreted as reflecting the sacred meaning of a child to their mother.
Aliso n O’Neill’s video “Punctures” visibly, yet more strongly vocally, relays her experiences of miscarriage and childbirth. She focusses on the impersonal reaction of medical staff who simply issue her with a yellow booklet noting they are sorry she lost her baby. In hospital giving birth to her son is equally fraught with process driven behaviour from the nurses as she does not meet the stereotypical image of a mother due to her short cropped blond hair. The lack of control and isolation felt by O’Neill reflects the complaint frequently made that women are neither listened to nor treated as individuals by the medical profession while experiencing pregnancy and childbirth.
“Ephemera” by Sharon Reeves consists of six carbon copy scrolls produced in fine fabric and a carbon copy book both detailing in manual typewritten font parts of conversations exchanged between women. Here she expresses the fast moving snippets of conversation that are short lived yet often infused with emotion that there is no time to explore. They represent the fractured nature of communication between women frequently disturbed by the domestic environment and the multiple identities a mother has to adopt in her everyday life. Issues and emotions can lose their impact when expressed in stinted, shortened bursts. The type written scroll format is similar to that of Mary Kelly’s “Post-Partum Document” of 1974 – 1979 depicting the early years of her son.
Amy Dignam’s “Memory Box” is a delicate and poignant representation of maternal experience relating to each of her three children’s treasured small toys. They have been gilded and placed in a tea box to be displayed as objects of great importance as they relate to items essential to a particular time in her children’s lives. The gold leaf transforms them to the viewer into precious objects to be both kept and admired thus emphasising the importance of everyday experience.
The depiction of female experience and in particular motherhood was a prevailing theme in the work of feminist artist collectives formed as a result of their involvement with the Women’s Liberation Movement of the early 1970s. In particular, the domestic and female experience was depicted in Feministo’s work and was displayed in an exhibition aptly entitled “Portrait of the Artist as a Housewife” at the ICA in 1976.
Both Feministo and the Desperate Artwives illustrate the importance of documenting female experience not only as a means of continuing the creative process but as a political tool. The issues facing women highlighted by the Women’s March remain as relevant now as they did in the days of second wave feminism.
Desperate Artwives Exhibition is an exhibition of many voices; it is a collection of imaginative and engaging artworks made by members of the Desperate Artwives group.
The works are brought together through the artists’ shared insistence on drawing the audiences’ attention to overlooked aspects of women’s lives. Caring and maintenance had been a central theme in the work of leading Feminist artists in the past, as in the seminal performance work Washing, Tracks, Maintenance: Outside where artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles washed the steps of the Wadsworth Atheneum in Connecticut in 1973 and in her collaborations with the New York sanitation department workers. Laderman Ukeles’ work drew attention to care work but avoided the inclusion of her personal experiences.
In contrast, many of the artists participating in Desperate Artwives at Lower Marsh, make their personal everyday experiences as mothers and wives a legitimate and important subject for their creative work. In many of the works on show, the artists celebrate and interrogate aspects of their every day, playfully representing the complex demands of childcare and domestic responsibilities, while other works challenge the viewer presenting raw expression of trauma and loss of personal identity brought about by the transition to motherhood.
Already at the entrance to the gallery, Susan Merrick’s Statements in Semaphore is insistent on making meaning and articulating a message, combining socially engaged, participatory practice, the work is the result of a collaborative practice where Merrick’s participants present themselves to her camera and become part of a language which is expressed through visibility, presence, and the body.
Further in, we encounter several works that challenge perceived notions of domestic and maternal experiences. Dagmara Bilon’s 69 soft toys performance and photographs, Katy Howe’s Becoming Birdgirl video and installation and Eti Wade’s Jocasta invite the audience to re-think dominant ideology and maternal bliss. Bilon’s performs with a pile of soft toys, attaching them to her one by one, gradually overwhelming her physically as she turns onto a woman-soft-toy-chimera. Bilon is compelled to fuse with more and more soft toys until she becomes unrecognisable and her sight and movements are obstructed. A process alluding to the gradually suffocating and overwhelming demands and identity loss brought about within the domestic.
Howe’s use of a Cindy-Shermanesque blond wig combined with her sculptural high-heel resin shoe-like objects, and the video in which she is trying to balance in them, expresses a doomed painful struggle to stand up and keep going. In Wade’s work, similar desperation is expressed, a maternal push-pull is illustrated through facial and physical gestures played out onto her child’s body in large paper prints pinned and flowing along the gallery walls.
Other works engage with the maternal and domestic in different ways, Bernardete Blue’s Mufti Day is a child’s costume made out of bread. Standing underneath it, where the flying child’s body would have been one is enveloped with the scent of freshly baked bread, invoking the homely but at the same time drawing our attention to the varied and confusing demands on mothers.
Rachel Fallon’s Our Lady of Picky Eaters is a sculptural installation playfully and powerfully invoking the drama sometimes experienced in regarding to nutrition and feeding of young children.
Mieke Vanmechelen’s Eilid 1 Eilid 2 and Damh beautifully drawn watercolours, explore transformation, becoming and inner worlds, through symbolism and metaphor and Mira Ho’s photographs re-present the imaginary subjectivity of the domestic in black and white prints.
Amy Dingam’s Memory Box 2015, elevates a selection of small ordinary plastic toys, often found in large quantities in homes with young children. Covered in gold leaf and carefully displayed in a little cabinet they are turned into precious objects. Re-thinking the excess, a by-product of western consumerism by turning them into memories, lifting them from mendacity into mementos of the preciousness of the everyday.
In Christine Thomas’s Untitled 2016, small smooth and white porcelain babies dwell in fibrous organic, containing and body like hand felted textile, the contrast between the textures and tactility of the materials drawing our attention again to challenges, conflicts, and struggles.
Maternal and domestic everyday is clearly and unflinchingly expressed by the Desperate Artwives artists including Esther Geis, Sharon Reeves, Alison O’Neill, Golnar Malek, Louise Nevett, Jane Hellings, Natasha Stanic Mann and Magdalena Jachimiak who also offer the viewer personal and powerful commentary on the complexity, challenges and creativity emerging from women’s lives, using personal experiences as source material and presenting important social commentary.
Previously overlooked these themes are powerfully represented in many of the works, sometimes designed to make the audience uncomfortable, sometimes just insisting on recognition and visibility.
Historically feminist artists expressing what would be considered mundane and sentimental would present aspects of women’s experience through an intellectualising prism or using distancing techniques to shape the work so it could fit art world institutions. Such as in Mary Kelley’s Postpartum Document and Mierle Laderman Ukeles Sanitation works.
Desperate Artwives, as collective forms a legitimising framework, which celebrates art that focuses on the lives of women as a central theme.
Practice and subjects considered too petty for high art or too sentimental for the gallery wall, the mothers, wives, and artists of Desperate Artwives come together to validate one another’s experience, and collaboratively insist on the significance of women’s lives as a subject for art.
