“A trip to hell a trip to heaven and the death of the self for a new self.” These words by the artist Susan Miller are the most poignant I read on motherhood in my early postpartum days. Surely, there was joy at the arrival of this new being, but an inexplicable fear that sank in just as deep as the euphoria. If you asked me I could not sum up this fear. I suddenly felt afraid of everything. Though I had performed the feat of labor and birth, I felt unqualified for the role of a mother. Fragments of my pre-birth self still exist, but it was healing to begin thinking of the baby's birth as my own rebirth. Instead of desperately trying to reclaim my old self, or contend with how she would exist alongside this newfound mother identity, I mourned her passing, and began looking to this new self with curiosity and excitement. “Amma/Mama 1440” is an ongoing body of work where I hope to account for every minute of a twenty-four hour period in the forms of painting, monoprinting and machine drawing. In these pieces I explore the differences in the culture I was brought up in, versus the narratives around childbirth, childrearing and motherhood in the West. The pieces are also an attempt to be present. I found the antidote to fear in mindfulness. In the more challenging moments, I am able to pause through the simple act of taking note of the exact time. It brings peace to know that time flows.
Jessica Mueller is an artist, writer, and educator who explores domesticity, labor and translation. She examines motherhood through ideas of care, service, weight and absurdity. Mueller engages multiple modes of making including embroidery, video, printmaking, painting, performance, and sculpture. She is interested in relationships to process, multiples, connectivity and site. Mueller is a Chicago-based teaching artist that has been partnering with Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education (CAPE) and Chicago Public Schools since 2004. Formerly a Program Manager at CAPE, she developed and supported partnerships for over forty artists, art teachers, and academic teachers, while working with principles and district officials. She holds a MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She exhibits locally and nationally, and her work is part of the permanent collections at SAIC’s Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection, Columbia College’s Center for Book and Paper Arts, and the Library of Congress. Mueller is a member of the Chicago ACT Collective and Mother Art: Revisited.
Michele Landel creates intensely textured and airy collages using burned, quilted, and embroidered photographs and paper to explore the themes of exposure, absence, and memory. She manually manipulates digital photographs to highlight the way images hide and filter the truth. She then sews layers of paper together to create bandages and veils and to transform images into fragile maps.
Michele is an American fiber artist. She studied Fine Arts and Art History at the University or Pittsburgh and the University of Texas. Prior to moving to France, she was involved with the Pittsburgh Three Rivers Arts Festival and worked for the gallery, Exit Art in NYC and the American Institute for Architecture in Washington, DC. Her work has been exhibited in the US, UK, and France. She lives and works in Sèvres, France.
The Redwork Series documents sometimes mundane details of my life as a parent. Combined with crying children, lack of sleep, relationship changes, and other external stressors, early parenthood becomes a sort of flawed madness which I work capture in this series. Each piece incorporates traditional stitching techniques, invented needlework techniques, and data drawn from my daily life as a parent. The materials and embroidery styles directly represent details of my experience in parenthood. This series is made in a style called redwork. Redwork embroidery is quite literally red work; all the floss is red. It is a traditional European style of embroidery generally used for very domestic needlework (hand towels, aprons, tablecloths). It is stitched with red floss on white or natural colored fabric. Historically embroidery was a hobby of the upper classes and royalty. The cost of the silk floss and materials was very high until a color fast red dye developed. This allowed the middle classes to take up embroidery as a hobby. I stitch in redwork because it is recognized as a domestic and middle class style of needlework which reflects my life as a parent. In addition to working the series in redwork, I stitch each piece both front-wards and backwards. Generally the skill of a stitcher is judged by examining the back of their work. This means that both the front and backside of embroidery pieces must be well stitched to be acknowledged as a well made work. This feels very similar to parenthood. Thru social media and mommy bloggers, Martha Stewart culture and playground politics, our culture builds an impossible standard for parenthood much like making work that is as well executed on the back as it is on the front. By stitching the work in both manners, I aim to reveal my flaws as a stitcher and parent. This work is an effort to reveal my true self. For Looks Like You’ve Got Your Hands Full I’ve tracked each time someone has commented “looks like you’ve got your hands full” to me over the course of 2017. It won’t be completed until the year ends. I then stitched each date onto the respective months of my vintage stamped for embroidery tablecloth. I noticed that people repeat this specific phrase to me while I’m walking with my kids, or carrying them at the supermarket. Even at restaurants and the car wash. It’s interesting that the phrase is so consistently the same and seems to come from the same place within each person. It seems like a desire to engage and acknowledge my parenthood and the challenges of parenting young children, yet the conversation rarely progresses beyond this comment. It also seems that it occurs during a very specific period of time in parenthood. I doubt I will hear this comment as frequently when my children are teenagers. In a way this phrase is similar to a popular song that you hear all the time for a few months and then years later it reminds you of that specific Summer. As for 5 Days My One Year Olds Cried documents five specific days where I was learning and growing as a parent. Over the period of five days I tracked each time my then one year old twins cried. The piece is flawed and incomplete. One skein of red floss bled and stained the table cloth evoking a sense of interruption and imperfection. 5 Days works to capture that overwhelming emotion of being at a loss as to what to do while navigating unfamiliar terrain. It is a sort of snapshot of sitting at the table, with the nth cup of coffee at hand, hearing a child cry, struggling with uncertainty and the feeling of failing. The Redwork series is a very intimate glimpse of my experience as a parent, which is both highly universal and very specific to me and my life in the past two years. It aims to reflect the manner in which I navigate the world differently in my newish role as Mommy, and how the lens of interpersonal engagement shifted in the environment around me in response to this.
“I often experience news stories of inhumanity as a literal blow to my body, and carry the negative energy around with me until I process a way to remove it from my person through transformative creation. My work functions as a meditation, a healing prayer, a potent incantation to embed the finished object with as much power as possible, to rival the impact of that original negative impetus for making it. I am aiming for a beautiful, exquisitely-crafted gut punch.
I consider the inordinate amount of time invested in each piece as a gift given to the viewer. In this day and age, it often feels as though the earnest, cathectic things I make are an act of profound resistance: I give birth to the tactile as I am swallowed by the virtual. I obsess over craft as our world becomes disposable. I wield emotion in its messiness because it’s uncool. I work until my hands shake, because the world does not care.
I am banging my head against the wall, but the stain is beautiful.”