Motherhood Places

I always meant to come up with a better title, it’s been so long since I started this project that its name has probably stuck now!  It does what it says on the tin, a collection of art made in/of places I’ve found myself with my child in the pre-school years.

The project was born of a maelstrom of feelings at around the 2 year mark, I really hadn’t managed to get back to my (previously full time) art practice, nothing near it and I’m the sort of person who suffers internally when I’m not getting to vent on to a canvas.  And if I suffer internally it manifests as outbursts, apathy, resentment, distance, all directed at the nearest and dearest and that always brings about an awful hangover of shame and general doom because aren’t you told “you must enjoy every minute because it goes in a blink”!  And hopefully it goes without saying the standard privilege and joy were there running parallel.  But my art is the thing that’s all about me so if there are tortured feelings, that’s where they’ll be.

Nursery is, as you will find if you have a child in Northern Ireland, £60-ish per day (it varies for private childminders and can be a lot more for city/top rated) and this is only starting to be relieved thanks to tireless campaigning by Melted Parents and their cross-party efforts in the Stormont assembly. So childcare wasn’t really an option (we did take 1 day a week so I could work a bit).  

Anyhoo!  None of this is special or unusual. But nonetheless, it’s been a rare period in which a subject and its wider issues has affected me so directly and so… bigly.  I had to make art about it.

I applied for a couple of programmes and exhibition slots to make a collection of work, using

my usual process of sketching - painting/printmaking but instead of it being landscape, there would be a shift to “places” and I would make those motherhood places the subject.  I was also finding that often, the initial scrawls in my sketchbook were more dear to me than paintings I was making from them in the studio.  So making the drawings “the art” was appealing and more achievable.

Any applications I made were rejected, as is often the way, so I went around the side door and got some Council funding to put towards mentoring in support of a self-realised project. This would help me plan not only the making of the work, but also documentation and eventual exhibition/further work around it.  Without a deadline/funded making time, it’s been slow going as I’ve been distracted by paid work, summer holidays, and now the eventual start of primary school but that’s given it genuine breathing room.  Whenever I come back to it I’ve got new perspectives and another idea for taking it on a bit.

I’ve been guilty of “filling the walls” for a deadline before so to make something so organically and slowly, to be “hopefully shown some time when it’s finished” feels very exciting, it’ll be done when it’s done.

After a generous studio visit from Catherine Hemelryk from the Centre of Contemporary Arts, Derry/Londonderry, she suggested I approach Sally O’Dowd to ask for some mentoring time.  Sally is an artist based in Vault Studios in Belfast, also a mother, and I really connect with her own work in which the drawings are the star, they’re really “of the place and time” and are often captured in a monoline/few lines, which is one of my favourite ways to start my sketching sessions too. 

Culture Ards & North Down funded the mentoring and I’ve since also had a really inspiring

curator-meet via Visual Artists Ireland.  I had a 15-minute speed-curate with Jane Morrow from PS2  who put me in the direction of bursary options for venue/audience development, and also Ben Crothers from the Naughton Gallery at Queen’s, with whom I had a great chat about the format of exhibitions and how limitations on size can be the commentary on the situation of a time (ie if I have only made drawings sized A3 or less, it’s because that’s what fitted in my case that I carried around!).

So.  The stage it’s at now is taking a tiny kit with me at all times to try and get more in-situ scribbles, translate a few favourite sketches in to screen print/etchings and perhaps, just maybe, as I have the days back with the start of primary school… I might make some rose-tinted, reflective, bigger studio work.  Because really you must enjoy every minute you know, it goes in a blink.