I’m standing in front of Sea, a large-scale installation by Jodie Carey commissioned for London’s Foundling Museum. It was inspired by the tokens that mothers left, along with their children, at the Foundling hospital, Britain’s first home for children at risk of abandonment, in order that they should be able to one day identify and claim back their offspring. Sea is formed of hundreds of swatches of fabric dipped in liquid clay and fired to create fragile, pale textured fragments where the original material has burned away. The effect of these fragments – the shells, essentially, of the maternal comfort objects belonging to some of history’s invisible children – is startlingly moving.
On Mother’s Day I had gone to the Foundling Museum and seen some of the tokens for myself, and learned how rare it was that a woman came back for her baby. Sea pays tribute to these babies and the impoverished mothers who could not keep them. According to the exhibition guide, “the mothers’ intense feelings of separation and loss find a visual analogy in the vast ceramic outpouring.”
I’m at the group exhibition for the fourth Mother art prize, which is open to all women and non-binary visual artists with caring responsibilities. Of 630 entries, 21 artists were selected for this year’s show, which is at north London’s Zabludowicz Collection until 25 June. Giving me a tour are Dyana Gravina and Paola Lucente, the two directors of Procreate Project, an arts organisation founded in 2013 that supports the development of contemporary artists who are also mothers. As well as the Mother prize, Procreate also runs the Mother House Studios, which has integrated childcare. To call them game-changers in an art world that has long been a hostile environment for mothers would be an understatement.
A triptych of paintings by WK Lyhne are particularly striking: grotesque corporeal composites of canonical works of western art assembled in the shape of the Madonna and child. Stabat Mater (Standing Mother) combines a draped torso from Delphi, the head of a lion from a 14th-century Venetian plaque, and an Athenian minotaur. These paintings are some of curator Lucente’s favourite pieces. “They’re stunning and related to a more human way of looking at the way we treat animals and the world in general, using maternity as an instrument to show how we are basically dominating the world and the animal world as well.”
Artist mothers – past and present – are having a moment. Last year there was the Louise Bourgeois retrospective at the Hayward; this year there’s Berthe Morisot at Dulwich Picture Gallery and Alice Neel at the Barbican. Neel, who was said to have left her baby on the fire escape in order to paint, never had a studio. Like many mother-artists, she worked at home, where she could do both. Barbara Hepworth, who is also featured in Julie Phillips’ recent book The Baby on the Fire Escape, exploring creativity and motherhood, always argued that having children need not detract from the work, and that the two in combination could nourish a rich life. Books such as Hettie Judah’s How Not to Exclude Artist Mothers, Lauren Elkin’s Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art (out this summer) and the art historian Joanna Wolfarth’s Milk, a memoir crossed with a visual history of breastfeeding, further enhance the conversation. And it isn’t just about reappraising the mother artists of the past: Caroline Walker’s intimate, moving scenes of childbirth at the Fitzrovia Chapel and her paintings of early motherhood at Stephen Friedman Gallery last year (you can see one currently at the Foundling Museum’s Finding Family exhibition) have been widely praised. Standing in front of her painting of breast-pump equipment last year, I felt emotional to see these “humdrum” maternal objects elevated to the status of a still life.
That one can be both an artist and a mother should not be controversial. Gravina, who founded Procreate Project, references Tracey Emin’s famous avowal that she would have been “no good” as an artist had she had children. “It makes me sad,” says Gravina. “We want to change preconceptions of artist mothers, not only in terms of the themes of their work, but also what that work should look like, which is why we have several large-scale installations in the show that contribute to the aim of unpacking and shifting the stereotypes associated to what type of art is made by mothers/parents, inside or outside the domestic contexts.” Xie Rong’s Painting Until It Becomes Marble – Love Never Dies (2019) reinterprets Yoko Ono’s interactive artwork of the same name: here it dominates the space at the Zabludowicz Collection as a gigantic abstract ink painting created during a period of mourning for her mother-in-law using the artist’s own hair as the brush.
For the prize, submitted work does not have to be new, making it far more inclusive of those whose caring responsibilities have affected their ability to make fresh work. Nor do the entry criteria stipulate a theme – the works do not have to be about motherhood per se, though many are. As well as increasing the visibility and representation of mothers working in the visual arts, Gravina notes that “there was also the urge to normalise mothering and care as valid subject matter as part of an artist’s creative output. The question ‘How do we make this experience worth it as an artistic subject?’ is unfortunately still relevant.” Although she says that conversations about this are now happening more frequently, “we’re still talking about mothers and parents as a niche. Not enough actions are taken to challenge the way we support, display, sell and experience art.”
“My experience is similar to many artists,” says Lucente, whose toddler is lying on her stomach with her eye to the cracks in the floorboards. “As a curator, I really found it difficult when I had a small baby. Finding a space – mind space as well as physical space – to go back to my practice was hard. Working in the art world is not just a job for us. It’s a passion. It’s our life, it is who we are. We cannot go far from it. So at some point you really feel you have to produce and create. We want to make sure that artists who have procreated, who want right away to continue practising, are able to do so.”
The show’s opening night is a joyous occasion, with children running around interacting with the artworks as their parents drink wine and chat. And the conversation is frequently stimulating. The artist Qian Qian – whose mythic, resonant works are included in the show – tells me about her unexpected first pregnancy, how she was a young student at Goldsmiths when she decided to keep her baby despite being at the very beginning of her career. The experience of working at the Mother House Studios allowed her to work with her children – she has two – around her. There’s something exuberant and energising about the presence of all these boisterous little ones in a space that is usually intended to be quiet and contemplative. Upstairs, I spot the American artist Hannah Ballou with her daughter watching a bit of her performance piece GOO:GA (“contains salty language, nudity, erstwhile animals, dodgy child acting, ironic pelvic movement, ukulele feminism, four minutes of literally nothing happening, and themes of foetal illness”).
I watch her on screen, heavily pregnant and discussing the terrifying medical diagnosis that her unborn son received using a tableau of the vegetables that always seem to be used to chart a baby’s growth, with my heart in my mouth. Despite the grimness of the subject matter, it is hard not to crack a smile. When we speak, she tells me that thanks to Great Ormond Street hospital, her son lived. Downstairs, Mee Jey’s My Baby pays tribute to the migrants who die in search of a safe home, becoming a “ghost mother” for them all in an affecting conceptual work of remembrance. That’s the beauty of this show: there is death and there is survival, darkness and light, fury and hilarity.
• The Mother art prize exhibition is at the Zabludowicz Collection, London, until 25 June
