I am a young adult cancer survivor and recently had my first child. These life events have greatly impacted my creative practice. Confronting my own mortality at age 25 and then experiencing the fragility and strength of birth, I have become obsessed with tracking time- documenting the small, routine moments of my life and my child's life. I am interested in content and parts of life that loop and repeat. I find that abstracted, repeated marks communicate the passage of time and memory best in my work. I want to give the viewer intimate, personal moments that capture the both fleeting and endless seconds of being alive.
Katherine Rutecki is a multidisciplinary artist who specializes in cast glass sculpture and in recent years has expanded into performative works. Rutecki’s current work explores defenses and boundaries of self. She holds a BFA in sculpture from the New York College of Ceramics at Alfred University, New York and a MFA in glass from Southern Illinois University, Illinois. She has been involved in several international group exhibitions, taking place at such venues as the New Orleans Museum of Art and the Ebeltoft Glass Museum in Denmark; and solo exhibitions in the US, New Zealand, and Europe.
As an artist and mother, I interweave the performative gestures of motherhood in my soft sculptural forms, consisting of fabric, yarn, and thread. My recent work, presented in the four-part installation, "Composite Tension" ("Corpus", "Slew", "Cleave" and "Tensile"), is informed by a personal archive, "Documentation Series: Year Off" (2018), where I took videos of my maternal body in relation to my child. I re-watched the videos each day and wrote my observations in two notebooks. The notebooks recorded my anxieties of being a good mother; separation, and the weaning process. I shredded and incorporated the handwritten pages into the sculpture "Corpus". The pregnant body is a vessel for containment, yet it exudes and spills out. The messiness extends to how the pregnant/maternal body exists as a part of another and is undefinable within patriarchal-capitalistic society. Through the discourse of craftivism, I investigate the tensioned relationship between motherhood and the artworld. The sculptures in "Composite Tension" are more than just undefinable messy bodies—they are messy bodies with the potential to speak about care within an institution. The softness, labour, and time speak to care. As I place them in the gallery space they remain as caring objects; as soft undefinable bodies. They are messy bodies; they are political bodies.
Tiana Traffas is currently creating a series titled Arcana Ma. Arcana meaning secrets or mysteries, Ma as in mother or motherhood: mysteries of motherhood. This ever unfolding body of work explores the taboos and experiences of motherhood through archetype, personal experience, mythology and symbolism from the ancient goddess cultures to modern-day mamas. It also includes work that views the other phases of womanhood, maiden to crone, and the life-death-rebirth cycle through the len of motherhood. Arcana Ma only exists because of her daughter's birth. The artist's initiation into motherhood cracked her wide open into a psychedelic and potent transformation, leaving her reborn on an emotional and spiritual level. The act of birth and the continuous trip of motherhood is the inspiration for this series.
Memory is neither static nor absolute. The mind recalls memories imperfectly, adding and releasing details, never able to recall the elusive truth of personal history. Childhood memories are bound in this reality of remembered facts and forgotten particulars, true fictions unto themselves. No one teaches women how to be mothers. It is a skill learned through memory and emulation. A woman follows the teachings of the women who raised her, but only her own recollection of the lessons. Her memory is unerringly altered in the retelling of time. The maternal figures who so influenced her own course to motherhood are now only ghosts, hazy, their voices faint. By creating drawings of mothers in charcoal and their offspring in pen and ink I reflect on the blur of motherhood and the divide of the clarity of child rearing. The layers of vellum depict the separation of the past and future generations of women. Like memory, vellum slightly clouds and obscures the mothers. The images of the mothers are rendered in charcoal, which can be fuzzy, messy, and imprecise, like a child’s impression of a parent. On the other hand, the children are drawn in pen and ink, which is tedious and painstaking and permanent – much the way parents view childrearing. Pen and ink requires study – every line deliberated upon and purposefully chosen, much like every decision in parenthood. A child does not notice a new line on a parent’s face, or a new gray hair; a parent notices every scrape and scratch, the precise shape of a new tooth or the tremor of a closed eyelid. These mediums explore simultaneously what it means to be the child of a mother, and the mother of a child. Through this series I explore motherhood and the mutable remembrances of childhood in the context of memory.