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.
Italian born, Amy moved to London in 1998 and graduated from Central Saint Martins College in 2005. Her work is mainly autobiographical but also holds a socio-political dynamic. Making the personal public her work originates from the female body, concepts of everyday life, loss of identity, the importance of memories and the abstraction of longing are central to her practice. Domesticity as a ‘visual language’ where maternal subjectivity is explored via different media such us drawings, photography, video installation and performance.
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.
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.
Taking the bodily, medical and performative contents that make up my artistic practice, I use my own orchestrated experiences of medical tourism procedures as a public platform to encourage discussion about the cultural, political and social meanings assigned to the female body and its capabilities. The bodily interventions include tubal ligation in Thailand, hymenoplasty in Poland, IVF consultations in Bulgaria and full breast tattoos in Latvia. I believe that upholding the high status of motherhood and treating childfree people as deviations from the standard of motherhood is clearly limiting to childfree women in terms of their acceptance as valuable contributors to the society and as people free of biological determinism. The aim of my artistic research is to contribute to the growing field of investigation in the childfree lifestyle and to question the standard of the normativity of motherhood for women in the Western society and to link the social stigmatization of childfree people with investigations in sociology, performativity, bioethics, body art, feminism and queer theory.
The Next Thing, Bury Art Museum and Sculpture Centre, Moving Image Gallery, Bury, UK
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”.
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’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.
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 Maternal in Creative Work examines the interrelation between art, creativity and maternal experience, inviting international artists, theorists and cultural workers to discuss their approaches to the central feminist question of the relation between maternity, generation and creativity.
This edited collection explores various modes and forms of art practice which look at mothers as subjects and as artists of the maternal experience, and how the creative practice is used to accept, negotiate, resist or challenge traditional conceptions of mothering. The book brings together some of the major projects of maternal art from the last two decades and opens up new ways of conceptualizing motherhood as a creative and communicative practice. Chapters include intergenerational discussion of art practices in the 20th and 21st centuries, representations of breastfeeding and infertility in creative projects, the notion of the ‘unfit mother’ and childlessness, together with the experiences of women and men that take on maternal identities through many forms of kinship and social mothering.
The Maternal in Creative Work will be essential reading for interdisciplinary students and scholars in cultural studies, gender studies and art theory and will have wider appeal to audiences interested in maternity, childcare, creativity and psychoanalysis.
My work represents my frustrations about domestic life, by communicating the raw, unfiltered side of how my anxiety and motherhood sometimes coincide. By addressing the harsh stigmas society has towards both anxiety and motherhood, I hope to normalize the reality rather than continue the cycle of these idealized notions of what motherhood is supposed to be. My work may appear selfish at times, but I think that is ok, and should become the societal norm. It is a part of the job description as a parent that your needs become second to your child’s, but your needs must not be forgotten. The work that I am creating allows me to release my frustrations about domestic life, and motherhood is a part of that. Recognizing my faults as a person, as a mother, and learning from them can only make me better at my job. I visually express the exhaustion I feel from the seemingly constant and endless amount of housework with Good Moms Need Help II. I used a domestic object, an ironing board, I then bent and twisted until it became useless. Useless in the sense of being an ironing board. It appears sad, tired, it is trying desperately to perform its duties but can’t. I should be able to discuss my feelings and frustrations without ridicule but that is not often the case. I am often met with, “you’ll miss these days,” resulting in my feelings being again disregarded, and as if I can feel nothing but happiness about motherhood or I am viewed as ungrateful. Will I miss this time in my children’s lives? Absolutely. Is it also valid that some days the housework and messes they create are exhausting and make me go crazy to the point I complain, absolutely.
I am a Portuguese interdisciplinary artist living and working in Southern California. My lived experience and my interest in activism are the driving forces in my creative process. I use my artwork as a tool for activism, drawing on social issues that have affected me on a personal level, such as my experience of motherhood, the politics of childbirth or sexual violence. My artwork explores universal issues of gender and collective identity, culture, memory and loss, while it is imbued with the feeling of saudade, a typically Portuguese trait roughly translated as a nostalgic longing or yearning of someone or something of the past.
I have used a wide range of media - including painting, installation, social practice, video and sound - but drawing and photography remain at the core of my practice. Influenced by Vija Celmins's drawings, Andrea Bowers use of text and activism and Suzanne Lacy’s commitment to social justice, my work examines inequality and is borne out of a desire to call attention to the often invisible and overlooked issues that affect primarily women.
@celiarochastudio
China Martens started her pioneering mamazine The Future Generation in 1990. She was a young anarchist punk rock mother who didn’t feel that the mamas in her community had enough support, so she began publishing articles on radical parenting in an age before the internet.
The anthology of her zine, The Future Generation: The Zine-Book for Subculture Parents, Kids, Friends & Others, was first printed in 2007 and has been out of print for many years. Covering sixteen years, it uses individual issues as chapters, focusing on personal writing, and retaining the character of a zine that changed over the years—from her daughter’s birth to teenagehood and beyond.
We are proud to present a tenth-anniversary edition including a new afterword by China’s grown daughter, Clover. The Future Generation remains a timeless resource for parents, caregivers, and those who care about them. Though first published in the 1990s, many of the essays and observations—about parenting, children, and surviving in a hostile political climate—still ring true today. The next four years are going to be especially demanding for those trying to balance parenting, politics, and survival. We’re going to need the voices and experiences in The Future Generation now more than ever.
For over sixty years, Selma James has been organizing from the perspective of unwaged women who, with their biological and caring work, reproduce the whole human race—along with whatever other labor they are performing. This work goes on almost unnoticed everywhere on the planet and in every culture. When this work is not economically prioritized, politically protected, or socially supported there are dire consequences for the whole of humanity, beginning with women and children.
This much-anticipated follow-up to her first anthology, Sex, Race, and Class, compiles several decades of James’s work with a focus on her more recent writings, including a groundbreaking analysis of C.L.R. James’s two masterpieces, The Black Jacobins and Beyond a Boundary, and an account of her formative partnership with him over three decades. Her experience with the Caribbean movement for independence and federation is reflected in her introduction to Ujamaa, the extraordinary work of Tanzanians to bypass capitalism, and much more.
Steeped in the tradition of Marx urging the need for a “practical movement,” James recounts the unusual history of how autonomous organizations formed within the International Wages for Housework Campaign and reshaped it. Women of color, queer women, sex workers, women with disabilities … each independent but mutually accountable (including to the men’s network with whom they work) as they confront sexism, racism, deportation, rape, and other violence.
James makes the powerful argument that the climate justice movement can draw on all the movements’ people have formed to refuse their particular exploitation, to end the capitalist hierarchy that is destroying the world. Our time is now.