Alana Tyson’s work attempts to make sense of the world she inhabits. As an immigrant to the UK and a natural observer, she feels highly responsive to the contradictions of everyday life.
Her uncertain questioning of diverse thematic concepts is a tactic for working through the problems she encounters, incorporating performance, sculpture and installation utilising found, altered and constructed elements.
Tyson is drawn to dualities and incongruities. A commonality between her chosen materials is their link to domesticity. Everyday items, such as suit lining or crochet cotton, become carriers of meaning and reflections upon Tyson’s deep-rooted responses. The material contrasts and tension within Tyson’s work transforms the mundane into the visceral.
Working from a feminist perspective and employing images and materials from daily life, Claire Greenshaw engages with the tensions that arise from the ambiguity of representation. She channels this into humorous and idiosyncratic poetic gestures that provoke questions around perception, the complexities of history and systems that create and enforce the values we live by.
The Artist’s Studio is Her Bedroom, Contemporary Art Gallery, 2020.
https://www.contemporaryartgallery.ca/exhibitions/the-artists-studio-is-her-bedroom/
The final presentation of my MA consists of a body of work entitled GRAVIDUS. The name GRAVIDUS is the Latin word for pregnant but can also mean heavy, burdened or teeming. This is appropriate for this work as it represents the physical aspects of my own pregnancy both internally and externally and also some of the emotional feelings that were present throughout. As a whole, the work uses the mould-making process as a basis for creating sculptural pieces and indirectly references my changing bodily state in pregnancy.
GRAVIDUS I is comprised of a series of nine plaster blocks of variable size with different interior forms. For the MA show, it was arranged systematically over two reclaimed wooden structures. The materials used for the work’s display reference the supporting mechanism used within industry and workshop production to add strength to a final sculpture or building material. The openness of the display allows for different visual effects as the viewer moves around the piece and links to the visible internal spaces of the pieces themselves and theoretical notions of the boundaries of the pregnant body.
I paint chaotic and dystopian domestic scenes. In surreal and crowded spaces women and children gesture as if from a medieval illuminated manuscript, or an Old Master like Bosch or Michelangelo. I choreograph powerful female protagonists and situate them in new imaginary realms to challenge domestic legacies that make women and mothers invisible.
Richly textured compositions use the fluidity of dripped bitumen with oil colour to create dynamic networks or patterns of ambiguous realism. The painting process is textual and performative, bodily creating figures that are excessive yet relatable. Small, cherubic, troublesome children embroil us in a palimpsest of narratives that question historical hierarchies and power structures.
My practice aims to excavate lived experience and initiate new conversations about value. Art is a space to open up cultural and social signification and ask for change.
Distanced Domestic exhibition by co.curation, London
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.
I am a mixed media artist, exploring themes of the Maternal, Relationships, Sexual Politics and the Cycle of Life.
I am particularly attracted to Flora's life cycle; I link these to human experience using Anthropomorphism and Pareidolia, these are documented via Photographs & Sculptures, where inspiration from the natural world has become fundamental to my practice.
My sculptures are made from non-traditional materials, based on seeds, their shape & form are often reminiscent of human body parts
Currently my work focuses on pregnancy, motherhood and in particular the dynamics of Mother-Daughter Relationships, Since becoming a Mother myself, I have become obsessed with trying to document 'Moments' & 'Memories', and the 'Essence of my mother', in an attempt to understand the complex relationship that I have with my own mother.
My current work views the world through the lens of a parent, simultaneously embracing joy, frustration, hope and fear. My work has always engaged in the liminal states of consciousness, through examinations of precipices, seams, folds, and crevices. In this new work, figurative elements of hands: my own and my children’s, become further lenses for exhuberence or despair. In some cases the hands obscure, and in others highlight. Both experiences are true, useful, and not mutually exclusive. I often feel that my arms are my most precious resource. They allow me to hold hands across parking lots, to carry bags, to prepare meals, to wash dishes, to gesture when I am intensely speaking, to draw, to write, and they are often full.
Precarious balance has always been at the crux of my work, and never has it seemed more true to my lived experience than as an artist and mother. The imagery included with the arms and hands continues to reflect the landscape, as I am habitually drawn to rock formations and fields of flowers. I connect this imagery to the world we inhabit, are desperate to protect, and which holds the history of generations. Through this work, I hope to examine and share the experience of motherhood, in all that is devastating, and all that is jubilant.
The female experience is a reoccurring theme in my work. My jewelry and sculpture is informed by everyday interactions and observations of gender-based expectations or generalizations. Within advertisements, popular culture, and the media; similar colors, patterns, shapes, beautification techniques, and pastimes intended for women are apparent. My material choices, surfaces, and forms are developed in one way through my exposure and interest in this experience.
The shapes and forms of my pieces come from disparate inspirations including the female form, faceted gems, historic jewelry and metalwork, and tools or implements for beautification or medical procedures. The surfaces of my work are often ornate, etched with lace patterns, and at times are paired with actual crocheted elements. These choices allude to femininity initially by being flowery, lacelike, and curvilinear, by their association with popular use in women’s apparel, and since the act of crochet or lace making is currently and was historically known as a women’s skill. I choose to incorporate skin, red, and pink toned colors in my work primarily to reference human flesh, cosmetics, the body, and blood.
Materials such as skin toned rubber and mirrors reference bodily transformation, self-examination, and vanity. Other materials like pearls, jewels, lustrous fabrics, feathers, enamel, hair, silver, and gold are chosen for their aesthetic qualities, emotional resonance, preciousness, and value associations. With these materials, formal considerations, and influences I create work that is both playful and beautiful and at times even absurd or humorous.
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.
My work is multidisciplinary, installation-based, and performative, exploring notions of the domestic and the urban through the intimate (or public) matters of living together; personal care and household maintenance; wellness and well-being; and the effects of globalization and technological development upon living space. Propelled by narrative, installations probe issues of social discomfort and our cultural obsession with cleanliness; the methods through which society sanitizes women; our desire for quick-fix methods of self-help and self-care; and the increasing invisibility of technological infrastructure in the urban and domestic landscape.
I have recently been the societal tendency to position the figure of the Child as representative of “the future” – a reliance on reproductive futurism - and the problems of this representation for those who choose not to reproduce or cannot reproduce. I’m interested in positioning issues of social reproduction alongside those of biological reproduction and exploring the notion of reproductive futurity alongside the neoliberal characteristic of cleanliness as generating a forward-facing pathway. I’m interested in deconstructing notions of “the future” and asking questions about ideas of care in relation to reproductive futurity and the drive for technological “innovation”.
In 2012 I founded An Artist Residency in Motherhood — a structured, fully-funded artist residency that takes place inside my own home and life as a mother of two young children.
Artist residencies are usually designed as a way to allow artists to escape from the routines and responsibilities of their everyday lives. An Artist Residency in Motherhood is different. Set firmly inside the traditionally “inhospitable” environment of a family home, it subverts the art-world’s romanticization of the unattached artist, and frames motherhood as a valuable site, rather than an invisible labour for exploration and artistic production.
As the first artist-in-resident-in-motherhood I aim to embrace the fragmented mental focus, exhaustion, nap-length studio time and countless distractions of parenthood as well as the absurd poetry of time spent with young children as my working materials and situation, rather than obstacles to be overcome.
The following works are amongst those made during my tenure as Artist-in-Residence-in-Motherhood;
The Distance I Can Be From My Son
All Scissors in the House Made Safer
63 Objects from My Son's Mouth
The project is archived in full at www.residencyinmotherhood.com. On conclusion of my tenure in May, 2014 the project will be passed along to two new residents.
An Artist Residency in Motherhood was funded by the Robert C. Smith Fund and the Betsy R. Clark Fund of The Pittsburgh Foundation and a Sustainable Art Foundation Award, and supported in kind by Pittsburgh Filmmakers and Pittsburgh Center for Creative Reuse.An Artist Residency in Motherhood was exhibited at Pittsburgh Center for the Arts in 2012, and documents and works from the project are currently being exhibited in Complicated Labors at University of California Santa Cruz, curated by Irene Lusztig & Natalie Loveless until March 15th 2014.
I am fascinated by transformation processes.
I observe transforming spaces, economy, environment, cities, work, cells, bodies, knowledge, history, countries, roles, education, technology, relationships, selves, languages.
Becoming and being a mother is for me all about transformation. My first solo exhibition in the Zepter Gallery in Belgrade, Serbia was called Metamorphosis . The objects I made used banal everyday objects (plastic bags) and transformed them into an immense vagina or into umbilical cords falling from the ceiling. This story from 1999 was a intimate story of separating oneself from the primary family and a story about the everyday and the environment.
From 2006 to 2012 my partner and I went through a series of unsuccessful IVFs and several miscarriages. I did several sculptural works that documented this part of our lives - like the Womb exhibited in 2010 in Museum de Ceramica de l’Alcora, Spain. It was just about the pain, I guess.
In 2012, I was invited to make an urban intervention inside the Vesel Garden in Ljubljana, Slovenia. I was three months pregnant with my son and did not know what to expect about the occurring pregnancy. So I did an urban intervention with a participative performance and called this work Embryo garden. It was all about the thin line between life and death of the child to be, but also of the artistic child within myself.
My experience as a parent has been both challenging and inspiring for me as an artist. I explored the relationship between the roles of artist and parent in my 2016 exhibition in the Glass Atrium of the City Hall of Ljubljana, called A Thank You Note To the Cleaning Lady. The work that lent its name to the exhibition questions the relation between reproductive, maintenance work and having greater purpose in life. As a whole, the exhibition was born as a product of broken antagonism between being a parent and an artist and of cooperation between the two roles. The installation To Include Everything, Everything, Everything, Absolutely, Absolutely, Everything especially focused on that. And the work The Map is about the child experiencing and learning by himself, and the artist-mother just observing and taking notes. In this process, I sometimes feel as if steeling from him.