We (Cayla Skillin-Brauchle and Danielle C. Wyckoff) have come together to birth Reproductive Media, a project that focuses on all things family, gender, sex, and reproduction. Iterations of Reproductive Media have included a Mobile Zine Library and performative actions and workshops in which we facilitate discussions on these themes. The Reproductive Media Zine Library’s collection includes dozens of contributors who have produced zines related to these topics, ranging from personal experiences to statistics and facts. Our curatorial vision for this library is inclusive: we encourage individuals to share diverse information, experiences, and interpretations. This collection is an ongoing and ever-growing library.
Part of Reproductive Media’s larger mission is to provide educational and advocacy materials and support. Current resources we have produced as free booklets include ways to advocate for family-friendly* workplaces, suggestions for creating more inclusive educational settings, and other tools to advocate for legislative change such as ones that would support families for medical leave. (*We recognize an inclusive definition of family and remember that people receive love and support from partners, elders, children, siblings, lovers, pets, friends, and more.)
Reproductive Media stems from our shared investment in discussion and because our individual artistic practices utilize conversation and crowdsourcing as a tactic to research and create projects. Wyckoff’s project, “Please Tell Me a Story About Love,” has traveled around the world asking folks to do just that. The project’s open-ended structure situates the artist as listener, hearing and recording stories about all forms of love. Skillin-Brauchle’s “Data Collection” performances seek to create local data sets by interviewing community members in public places. While disparate in their approaches, these projects act as non-judgemental agents, recorders of contemporary experience. Our projects focus on the ‘local,’ whether that be a site or a community, and both projects collect responses that fuel our individual artwork in other material forms.
We believe that critical discussions require space. Reproductive Media creates such a space, one that is a public yet private forum, to talk about all things family, sex, gender, and reproduction: the choice to parent or not; the experiences of non-binary lives; governmental policy that is restrictive and policy that is protective; the challenges and rewards of parenting; experiences of becoming a parent through adoption, foster care, birth, or other paths; LBGQTIA+ rights; infertility and the emotional, physical and financial implications; miscarriage and fetal loss; birth control; abortion; models of prenatal care and giving birth (medical model and midwifery model); reproductive rights; reproductive privilege based on identity and socio-economics; sex; babies; gender; consent.
Zoe Freney is an artist, writer, educator and mother. These roles jostle for attention and time, but mothering is a constant occupation, and it is this never-letting-up that is borne out in Freney’s works. For Freney, painting remains a vital means of expression. The painting Thinking of Flying (2018) describes the frustration of having to forego the creative, meaning-making practices of painting as one struggles instead with the daily tasks of child rearing and the demands of the household. But within mothering there is still room for dreaming and reflection. There are opportunities to nurture children’s imaginations, to initiate them into creative lives. While Freney’s work examines the banality and joys of mothering, it is also about transcendence. We are all thinking of flying.
I’ve been a working artist, curator, community activist and teacher for more than 25 years, creating and producing intimate solo performances, large-scale public happenings, socially engaged interventions and performance art workshops and lectures. My practice extends across black boxes and white cubes, art fairs and subway stations, international festivals, and single bathroom stalls. I’ve operated an artist-run newsstand in a vacant subway station kiosk, a soup kitchen for artists, a breast milk tasting bar, and a performance festival hub for kids. I’m forever inspired by the rebel queers, renegade witches, and other dyke moms I run with, and bound to many brilliant artists, activists, spell-casters and healers. For many years I made performances that drew from my own experiences of trauma and transformation, intimacy and motherhood. More recently, I’ve experienced a shift in my practice, where my attention has turned to wider theoretical questions about the nature of performance itself to ask questions about when, where, how we perform - in theatres and galleries, on social media, and in our everyday lives.
I am an early career artist whose practice explores my fascination with fictional horror through primarily digital methods of making. Within the broader realm of horror, I have a particular interest in monsters, voyeurism, and depictions of female brutality, sadism, and masochism. Using my own image and body exclusively, my work presents versions of womanhood that transgress the bounds of what we are taught is acceptable, uncanny spectres of female experience that society is keen to repress. Here, monstrosity is configured as a source of damnation and agency, reflecting womanhood as complex and contradictory.
My own experience as a mother has been one of profound contradiction, of exhilarating highs and profound lows, of love and fury, comfort and trauma. I struggle to reconcile the fact that the greatest time in my life is also the one when it was the darkest, and that my body birthed a miracle but feels like a ruin. I am not as I was, but not quite sure what I am now; I’ve yet to turn into anything resembling the gargantuan mother archetype we’re fed, and too much of the old Jess remains for me to consider myself someone new. I have been transformed, reborn, reconfigured using the old parts. Some days those new parts feel like they were made of steel, making me infinitely stronger than I was, and other days that steel bites into my flesh, broken limbs fused back together suddenly failing to bear my weight.
Motherhood is a monstrous condition; it is incredible and disturbing, beautiful and completely fucked up. Like monstrosity, it is transformative, and for the woman-monster, this transformation is a source of both agency and damnation, strength and weakness. My work since my son is in part an attempt to reconcile the contradiction inherent in my own experience of motherhood, and to bridge the divide between what I am and what we are told a mother should be.
Experiencing pregnancy for the second time has greatly influenced my work, causing me to reflect much more closely on the process of bearing a child. There is the strange bodily awareness and attempts to reconcile this cavernous space that exists within me, and evocations of my own paranoias as I imagine this space as a place of both hope and doom. I like to think there is also some absurdity when one looks at a ridiculous, bulbous woman, or my lady-giants, but there is also the tenderness of the nets that keep the babies close to her body, or the way a stomach is opened up to sate the curiosity of the smaller figures who peer inside. There is the sorrow of the figure on the bridge as she surveys the fallen before her (a mediation on periods in history where the practice of fallen-mothers ending their lives and the lives of their offspring was not only a grim expectation, but an act of redemption), and my attempt to see a ruin as a place of beauty and life.
Joy Christiansen Erb is a contemporary photographer and artist whose creative research explores themes such as memory, identity, and storytelling. Her most recent body of work explores the subjects of motherhood and family. This body of work is an autobiographical journey examining the lives of her family and her domestic space. The images included in the series document both the struggles and triumphs of everyday life.
Her photography has gained recognition through regional and national exhibitions and lectures as well as a 2015 Ohio Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council. Recent and upcoming solo exhibition venues include the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, Center for the Emerging Visual Artists in Philadelphia, Peoria Arts Guild and the Galveston Arts Center. Recent group exhibitions include Newspace Center for Photography in Portland, OR, the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester, MA, Center for Photography at Woodstock and the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland. Her artwork has also been highlighted in a variety of publications including two notable textbooks. A portfolio of her most recent work is housed at the Museum of Contemporary Photography as a part of the Midwest Photographers Project in Chicago, IL.
She currently resides in Youngstown, Ohio, where she is an Associate Professor of Photography at Youngstown State University. She received her B.F.A. from Miami University, Oxford, OH and her M.F.A. from Texas Woman’s University.
Laura Endacott is a practicing artist whose research speaks to the contemporary mother and how it is linked to social movements, cultural activism and intellectual histories that challenge, yet enable the category of maternal art histories, as a site for knowledge production today. Her MA SIP degree (Specialized Individual Programs) combined Studio Art Production and Art History, and she is one of a few artist scholars in Canada, that explores and teaches the critical work that deals with the complex representations of the mother image. Her activities include her practice, her teaching, conference presentations and writing. Her recent work considers the body as an archive. As such she is interested in social life and articulations of agency using performance. She considers her work to be in the tradition of storytelling.
Her large-scale sculptures, performances and installations are part of an interdisciplinary practice. Her work has been included in a new anthology entitled Performing Motherhood (2014) and she has exhibited in museums such as The Orillia Museum of Art & History (2014), Le Musée des maîtres et artisans du Québec (2009) and The Textile Museum of Canada (2000). Her work has been included in artist-run galleries as well as non-traditional spaces such as the bankonart.net (2010), The Gladstone Hotel (2008) along with online exhibitions such as ArtWiki: Open Data for the Arts (2012). In 2014, the textiles objects she produced and that were used in a series of performances she staged in public space, were collected into the permanent collection of the Musée des maîtres et artisans du Québec. It was the first time any craft object linked to contemporary performative work was included in their collection, which represents the largest craft collection in Quebec.