The Maternal in Creative Work

The Maternal in Creative Work examines the interrelation between art, creativity and motherhood. An interdisciplinary range of international contributors look at mothers as subjects and as artists who produce auto/biography, text, performances and objects about the maternal experience.

Elena Marchevska, PhD, is a practitioner, academic and researcher interested in new historical discontinuities that have emerged in post-capitalist and post-socialist transition. She is researching and writing extensively on the issues of belonging, displacement, the maternal and intergenerational trauma. Her artistic work explores the relationship between the maternal, borders and stories that emerge from living in transition. She is an Associate Professor in Performance Studies at London South Bank University. Valerie Walkerdine, PhD, is an artist, academic and researcher bringing artistic and cultural practice together with cultural and social theory and research. Her work on the maternal focuses on issues of inter-generational transmission, expressing that work through installation, performance and practice-based work with de-industrialised communities. Her research and writing reflect these concerns and also focus on psychosocial aspects of intergenerational transmission in relation to class and gender. She is editor of the journal Subjectivity (Palgrave). She is Distinguished Research Professor in the School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University, Wales.

Forward by Lisa Baraitser; Preamble by Valerie Walkerdine; Chapter 1: Maternal art practice: emerging field of artistic enquiry into motherhood, care and time; Part I: Intergenerational maternal discussions; Chapter 2: Feminist intergenerational inheritance: a conversation; Chapter 3: Maternal Metaphors I and II: a labour of motherlove; Chapter 4: A cord that is never done away with: an aesthetic ontology of the pre-birth scene with Francesca Woodman and Bracha L. Ettinger; Chapter 5: Prisms of mourning: gender, justice and hope: Carrie Mae Weems' Colored People, 1989-1990; Chapter 6: The Mothernists; Chapter 7: A.M.M.A.A. - The Archive for Mapping Mother Artists in Asia; Part II: Encountering the maternal in artistic practice; Chapter 8: Blueprint for a ghost; Chapter 9: Maternal time travel: epistolary praxis as intergenerational care work; Chapter 10: A mother's work: a mother/daughter, seamstress/fibre artist's merging practice and politics; Chapter 11: The mother artist in the age of performance reproduction; Chapter 12: Returning to ourselves: Medea/Mothers' Clothes and Patience one decade on; Chapter 13: Unravelling family fictions: Stories We Tell, Daughter Rite and My Life Without Me; Part III: Maternal future: Interrupting the field; Chapter 14: One for Sorrow: the collaborative work of mother and not-yet-mother; Chapter 15: Identity through injury: contemporary adoption and the unfit working class mother; Chapter 16: The motherhood imperative: fertility, feminism, art; Chapter 17: Drawing as a creative exploration of 'circumstantial childlessness'; Chapter 18: Becoming ordinary: making homosexuality more palatable on TV; Afterwords: mothering the future