Space, Time and Motherhood

On Wednesday 9th May 2018 , my bonnet partner, Fiona Stirling, and I took occupation of a disused furniture warehouse in the fabric district of Liverpool, which had been transformed into the YPG gallery as part of the Time Tunnel festival. Time Tunnel was an international festival of art, music and performance featuring world firsts that took place in May 2018 to celebrate the launch of the Fabric District.

We occupied a room in the space sometimes alone, sometimes with our children, and made art at specific times in the day and evening. We initially used paint to draw and make marks on fabric and primed canvas using domestic and work related lists and other organisational material as inspiration for the work. This project culminated in a painting performance around the themes of space, time and motherhood, which took place in the space on Saturday May 12th. It was informed by Niki de Saint Phalle’s Shooting Paintings of the Sixties and Sarah Lucas’ more contemporary, One Thousand Eggs (2017) and involved soaking balls of tissue and toilet paper in paint and throwing them at the material, paintings, canvas, clothing and fabric that we had been exploring in the time and space allocated.

The Time Tunnel festival drew inspiration from the events of 1968: a year of creativity and upheaval, rights and repression, war and protest, and aimed to revisit the creative expression of 1968 to see how this fits with the political and social events of today. It not only recognised the key work of artists of the time in highlighting events of that year, but also featured emerging artists’ interpretations of today’s key issues.

Informed by this, our performance aimed to replicate the school and swimming bath rituals of our childhood, when as an act of rebellion we would soak tissues and toilet paper in water and launch them at the ceiling. Instead, we soaked them in paint. We invited the public to take part in this performance; children particularly, were encouraged to cover their clothes and shoes and take part in the performance with our children and ourselves. This act of defiance mirrors Niki de Saint Phalle’s “taking aim at everything she hated in the world”(1999) which I will discuss in more detail later

“It was a terribly exciting thing because one could get out all of one’s aggressive feelings and you weren’t harming anyone. I was able to get out all of my aggressions and not harm anybody.” (de Saint Phalle, 1996)

For this performance we commissioned Ali Stephenson, a seamstress/artist/collaborator to design and construct a series of white utilitarian 1960s style aprons and work clothes for our children and ourselves. These pieces were both worn during part of the performance to cover our clothes and allow marks to build up as a natural part of the painting process and also to be taken aim at and hung in the performance area.

A seminar session (see appendix for transcription) took place and the work was presented to an invited audience. Aesthetics, as well as political issues were discussed. We intended that the project opened up a conversation with others in terms of the themes. We invited a range of people including artists, some of who are mothers to engage in a dialogue with us.

Whilst the Time Tunnel festival raised key issues of rebellion and occupation we were also interested in exploring motherhood, space and time as artists and mothers. In this way perhaps this piece added an aspect to the festival that might otherwise have been missing- that of the women’s position. The idea of the occupation was inspired by the sit-ins of 1968 protests but, for us, became a way of having thinking time, having space to pause and consider, something we don’t normally have time to do.

Fiona: “How lucky we would be if we had our own space to actually work in, when normally I’m carrying my work around in a little bag or you’re sort of playing around with working in between teaching or in-between other things, we are using other peoples spaces, never really having our own space, [it] makes you think about those sort of luxuries really, and it is a luxury to have that time and that space to do stuff really.” (Seminar)

Politics of motherhood

We are always interested in where our children come into any piece of work. Often we are not able to make work without bringing our children along –sometimes we can sometimes we can’t but we felt that this project offered us the opportunity to both have some time to consider the piece but also to have space where we could enjoy and revel in making creative work with our children

 Fiona: “The only way we could actually take part in this project was by occupying a space, which links in with the whole 1968 revolutionary spirit of things, so lets occupy the space with our families and then make work and then that’s sort of draws attention to political issues as well quietly, the fact we haven’t got [enough time and space to make work] well, why are we having to do this? “ (Seminar)

Defiance

Niki de Saint Phalle’s shooting paintings Tirs were developed in the 1960s by plastering over household objects filled with powder paint that she then shot at, exploding paint and plastic over the white reliefs. We were interested in exploring the impetus behind these pieces as she took aim at various areas in society, in what Arken MoMA called an expression of “anger, vulnerability, strengths and optimism”(2016) De Saint Phalle herself explained “In 1961 I shot against: Daddy, all men, small men, tall men…society, the church, the convent, school, my family, my mother…” (1999)

In our performance this very visceral pleasure involved in taking aim and throwing paint-sodden clumps of paper felt to us like a soft rebellion; there’s something about throwing something or saying something - being brave enough to say what you think about a situation or an issue.

Fiona: “I think it was Dot [one of the children] that said, “This is great I can get all my anger out now!”

Amy: “She had a catapult...she was tooled- up.  She had a catapult and a bow and arrow; I don’t know what she was going to do with them but she was like “I’m having this now, I’m having this hour where I can just completely batter it” (Seminar)

Fiona: “There’s a quotation from Fahrenheit 451 “Those that don’t build must burn” and it talks about delinquents and juveniles and how its always been the same in the world, …I’ve thought about not having a voice and trying to build something through protest so its not futile, that you are getting your anger out and (building something up) I think that resonated a bit.” (Seminar)

Domestic Work

The aprons were developed with fellow collaborator/artist/seamstress Ali Stevenson. The original intention was to have 1960s domestic aprons that served as both an indication of home work and simultaneously covered and protected our clothes whilst performing with paint. As Ali researched the 1968 protests and particularly the role that workers had in building the momentum of the strikes instigated initially by students, the aprons developed a more “Utilitarian” form.

Aesthetics

“Its not about making a mess I want them be really neat, I want to make the most beautiful egg paintings” Sarah Lucas, One Thousand Eggs, April, 2017

In the seminar particularly there was a lot of discussion around the idea of aesthetics in the performance by all the adults there. There were certain stages as the children were throwing the paint where there was still a lot of white canvas exposed and the canvases looked beautiful-it was difficult to allow the children to continue with the process but they just wanted to throw paint. Some of the parents were trying to tell the children where to throw the paint in order to get the best aesthetic result. When the adults were given a chance to take part later, their shots were measured; the composition of the huge canvas pieces were given great consideration; as a participant of the seminar said “As if it was something you could get wrong!”

Ths performance was partly informed by Sarah Lucas’s One Thousand Eggs, a happening as part of her FunQroc Show at CFA Berlin where she invited women to participate in action painting by throwing hundreds of eggs against a wall of the gallery on Easter weekend 2017.  The aesthetics outcome of Space, Time and Motherhood were a consideration but ultimately another area of life with children that we had to ‘let go’

Amy: The performance itself turned out to be absolute mayhem because there’s kids involved! Which is life, that’s what it (Seminar)

Amy: But once those canvases were primed and ready to go, that was it then, that idea of controlling it was like gone, and there’s something quite nice about that- about not being able to control everything (Seminar)

This relates in some ways to the constraints both inherent in a domestic life with a family; the schedules, the lists and also some of the constraints I explored in my earlier work 15hours, 7days, 4weeks, 4months - a framework that you can not deviate from either through necessity or choice.

Ukeles and Maintenance

Mierle Ukeles 1969 document Manifesto for Maintenance Art asks for a reappraisal of the status of maintenance work in both public and domestic spaces. In it she discusses the cyclical nature of maintaining a domestic space whilst looking after a family and trying to produce artwork. She asserts the difference between labour and maintenance in an interview with Maya Harakara:

Maintenance is always circular and repetitive. Labour could be like building a highway from the Atlantic to the Pacific: once it’s built, it’s done. There’s labour in maintenance, but not all labour has to be repetitive (2016)

These were areas that we were interested in examining in Space, Time and Motherhood with some unexpected outcomes:

Amy: The irony is that we were supposed to be doing this for more time and space and we have now ended up with more cleaning up than we would have done at a weekend at home y'know so this is just a continual process; we were looking at Ukeles manifesto and how she talks in that about how this never ends, the cleaning up, the work, the maintenance, never ends. (Seminar)

Whilst watching the performance of Sarah Lucas One Thousand Eggs I found myself wondering whether Sarah Lucas herself would be cleaning up the mass of broken eggs on the gallery floor.

Clearly the Space, Time and Motherhood performance raises several issues as documented above, a couple of which I'm particularly interested in but for the purposes of this particular writing I’ll concentrate on maintenance and the politics of motherhood. This discussion around Steyerl’s notions of occupation led me to look at current discussion concerning the precarity of labour and how that might impact women, particularly mothers.

Whilst Julia Bryan-Wilson states “Debates about precarity — and an insistence that artists belong to the newly emerging “precariat”— have been increasingly taken up within contemporary art” (2012, p33 ) she acknowledges that whether in art or, like texts discussed earlier in this thesis  (see Beradi and Chun Hals), gender is generally invisible in these debates. It seems there is a tendency for gender to be not considered despite evidence that the impact on women could be significant. In her 2006 lecture Precarious Labour: a feminist viewpoint, Silvia Fedirici presents her critique of the theory of precarious labour that has been developed by Italian autonomist Marxists

My concern is that [this theory] ignores, bypasses, one of the most important contributions of feminist theory and struggle, which is the redefinition of work, and the recognition of women’s unpaid reproductive labour as a key source of capitalist accumulation

(Fedrici, 2006 )

And goes on to relate this specifically to mothers:

Once we say that reproductive work is a terrain of struggle, we have to first immediately confront the question of how we struggle on this terrain without destroying the people you care for. This is a problem mothers as well as teachers and nurses, know very well (Fedrici, 2006)

This dilemma of what Fedrici calls “a terrain of struggle” relates back to the coloured schedules and punctuated photographs documenting the constraint of time in 15hours, 7days, 4weeks, 4months. It was further examined in Time, Space and Motherhood and is present in many elements of the performance from our occupation of the space to the ritual

of putting our bonnets on.

The seminar in particular was a useful way of galvanising some of our ideas and processes. The opening up of the conversation and getting input from a range of people seemed to reiterate the relevance of some of these ongoing themes. This would appear to be an important part of this process going forward- as a range of performances that sit in the public domain this continuing dialogue seems indispensable.

Several significant questions have arisen from this project: Is there a way of exploring motherhood, activism and art? Does involving your children in projects through necessity open up interesting conversations about occupying time with your children? As Steyerl has argued in Art as Occupation, one of the differences between work and occupation is lack of an end result and, as previously discussed, Ukeles describes the difference between work and maintenance in a similar way. Both of these positions impact the themes that I am examining:

Occupation… could be a distraction, an entertainment, a passing of time so it is not hinged on any result and it has no necessary conclusion and it doesn’t imply that you will get paid or any idea of remuneration because the process itself is supposed to contain its own gratification, if you are occupied you should be thankful because it keeps you distracted and busy and entertained.

(Steyerl, 2012)

Clearly this presents further questions in the case of motherhood; the terms “distracted” or “entertained” I would argue, are not continual consistent states in motherhood and therefore I’m interested in further considering the notion of the occupation of motherhood and what that might look like. Is there a way in which Ukeles work developed only as a result of her being contained or restricted in her maternal/domestic position?

When I was in my studio, I kept thinking: is she really paying attention to the baby? And when I was with my baby I kept thinking: when am I going to do my work? (Ukeles, 2016)

Did the work for which she is best known develop purely as a result of this? And consequently, is there a way that in some cases, out of necessity, maternal art could be considered an activist act? Ukeles description of “A survival strategy” substantiates this idea as does her assertion that “I was in a panic that if l stopped doing my work l would lose it.” (2016)

I’m interested in Ukeles work before having children and how that unavoidably changed. I have often described feeling “leapfrogged” by my childless and/or male contemporaries when I had children, and in some ways my practice, like Ukeles, may have, been informed by this. Here she describes an element of her transition from abstract artist to activist

[the sculptures she had been making] cracked, they melted — it was just a disaster. I spent four years on this stuff….So, I sat down and I said, “If I am the artist, and if I am the boss of my art, then I name Maintenance Art.” And really, it was like a survival strategy, because I felt like “how do I keep going?” I am this maintenance worker, I am this artist… I literally was divided in two. Half of my week I was the mother, and the other half the artist. (Ukeles, 2009)

Airi Triisberg in her book Art Workers: Material Conditions and Labour Struggles in Contemporary Art Practice (2015), makes a comparison between art workers and nuns and their relation to work/labour and concludes there is an element of perceived devotion in both, this echoes not only Steyerl’s assertion that  “If you are occupied you should be thankful because it keeps you distracted and busy and entertained” (2012) but Fedrici’s argument that it is precisely because housework is unpaid that has reinforced the assumption that housework is not work.

All of these ask further questions in terms of a notion of the occupation of motherhood.

All of my projects described in this chapter address some of the themes I have been exploring in some way. However this final project Space, Time and Motherhood culminates and draws together all of the elements: Motherhood, time and activism.  

Some interesting issues came to light from Space, Time and Motherhood; the lack of restriction, inhibitions and messiness of involving our children in this performance compared with the regulations and constraints of essential everyday family timetables and schedules, demonstrate a way of utilising time spent with your children to make art. This raises more questions in regard to developing the occupation of motherhood – is working with children and the chaos inherent in that a form of constraint in terms of practice, similar to having limited time?  As an artist you cant really control either one. The relationship between the confines of limited time and the disorder of making work with children has an interesting tension that could be researched further.