I’ve spent the last decade exploring the world of domestic life and family systems. Although I started as a painter, describing the chaotic and contradictory world of parenting seemed to require a multi-layered, eclectic approach, and I have expanded my practice to include collage, installation and photography. Recently, I’ve been drawn into the digital worlds my children inhabit so readily (in part because the subject of ‘screen’ causes so much debate and anxiety in the cultural discourse) and the imagery I’ve found there has been surprisingly inspiring and oddly familiar. One game had a pixelated, modular landscape—touched with moments of surprising, naturalistic beauty—that became an excellent metaphor for my domestic world. I use this imagery layered with realism, as well as a layering of techniques, to develop the idea of parenting and domestic life as a many-layered experience: funny, moving, and labor-intensive.
Artist as Mother as Artist is a co-curated gallery exhibition by Sam Rose and Tracey Kershaw, featuring artworks across the disciplines of video, dance on film, photography, sculpture, drawing, print, and live art and performance documents. Showcasing fourteen local and national artists whose practice is based upon the inseparable relationship between being an artist and mother, all works featured have all been nourished, enabled, influenced and created as a consequence of the artist’s maternal experiences.
Additionally, there will be a series of professional development opportunities and public participatory events that will consider how parenthood can enhance creative thinking. These events will encourage debate and conversation, making the maternal a critical component of artistic discourse.
Artist as Mother as Artist aims to inspire child and parent collaboration and encourage artistic practice amongst mothers, who may feel a conflict between their artistic engagement and their day-to-day caring activities.
Artist as Mother as Artist project is supported by Arts Council England, ncn Lace Market Gallery, My Family Care, Lumen PR, Jazz Hairdressing and Creative Quarter Nottingham.
My work marries a functional, aesthetic, and conceptual approach to metal. She works with concepts of adornment to create works that use the body to engage in conversations that draw directly from her personal life.
“I was trained as a jeweler years ago, which brought me to understand the intricacies of creating work that is personal to each person wearing it and expresses parts of their life. The choice to work with precious metals has been because of their inherent strengths and weaknesses. I value silver, both for its culturally relevant quality and for its beauty. I employ copper for its strength and abundance. I am, after all, interested in creating something beautiful and desirable. As I continue to explore these personal narratives through these metals, themes that relate to my life as a mother begin to come through. My initial interest in small, intimate works, is finding a new source of expression that allows me to create intimate pieces that explore the relationships I have to my children.”
The pieces in this show were completed during my 2011-12 sabbatical leave from my position as Associate Professor at Eastern Oregon University. During this time I traded in my familiar oil paints in exchange for photos, magazines, scissors, and glue to create a group of collages depicting my infant daughter in a variety of surreal settings. The scenes were created using old doll-maker’s magazines, National Geographic magazines, Italian interior design magazines, and brochures for Canadian provincial parks and Tuscan tourism; combined with my own photos of the baby. The result is a strange world combining illogical spaces and multiple perspectives; alternately magical, disturbing, and beautiful. For me, these landscapes reflect the range of hopes and fears surrounding both childhood and child-rearing.
My work is driven by the technical challenge of piecing together intricate parts to create a cohesive whole. The transitions are never actually flawless, as closer inspection reveals sharp edges and layers of overlapping images from disparate sources. I find poetry in this complex relationship between the whole and the parts; where small pieces of imagery come together to form something altogether different and new. As a mother, I wish for all the complicated facets of society to come together harmoniously for my daughter’s safe passage. The Babyscapes collages render that impossible wish visible.
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.
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.