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.
Michelle Hartney is a Chicago based artist whose work addresses a broad range of topics, from women’s health issues, to the concept of heroes, love, and the cosmos. She works in a variety of materials, including fiber, wood, found objects, and most recently, performance. Her interest in using art to address social issues began during her graduate studies at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she was an Albert Schweitzer Fellow.
In 2015 she became the Chicago rally coordinator forImproving Birth's nationwide Labor Day rallies. Most recently, Hartney joined Every Mother Counts as arunning ambassador. With twenty-six years of distance running to draw from, including several marathons, triathlons, and running cross country and track for Purdue University, she is forming a team of men and women to race with and raise awareness about maternal healthcare issues. Click here for more information about joining her team.
Over the last 10 years I have been developing an artistic practice which is rooted in image making and spans live work, documentations of its products & traces and the re-presentation of these in other forms. With performance at its core, I investigate themes around feminism, abjection and ritual with a focus on interpreting or creating experiences in my own body. I have an active interest in the anthropological body, exploring the ways that social, cultural and political dynamics shape the perception and understanding of the human body and how these interactions are interpreted through social engagement how they are controlled through mass media and the arts.
In 2014 I created 'Raising the Skirt' in collaboration with Dawn Felicia Knox, which has since had international success being named one of Dazed and Confused's photo series of the year 2015. RTS is a multi-layered arts project which calls for the (re)claiming of the cunt, we are working on representing a diverse and fierce femininity through re-appropriating the defiant act of raising the skirt which is buried deep into many of our cultures.
'Landing in Her Skin' began in the spring of 2015 and aims to document the transition of woman to mother and back again, being a mother comes with its own otherness, this project will follow the lives of women and their ever changing body.
Biography
Born in North East England (UK), Nicola Hunter (formerly Canavan) has been performing and showing work nationally and internationally since 2007 within programmes such as Momentum Festival (Brussels), ]performance s p a c e[ (London), Inbetween Time Festival (Bristol), City of Women (Ljubljana) and SPILL National Platform (Ipswitch). She has collaborated with Predrag Pajdic, Manuel Vason (Double Exposures) and Ernst Fischer and has been awarded the Artsadmin Bursary, the Artists International Development Fund and has been financially supported and mentored by Unlimited, Live Art Development Agency and Pacitti Company.
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.