M.A.M.A. Issue n.22: Martha Joy Rose
The ProCreate Project, the Museum of Motherhood and the Mom Egg Review are pleased to announce the 22nd edition of this scholarly discourse intersects with the artistic to explore the wonder and the challenges of motherhood. Using words and art to connect new pathways between the academic, the para-academic, the digital, and the real, as well as the everyday: wherever you live, work, and play, the Art of Motherhood is made manifest. #JoinMAMA
March, 2017 Martha Joy Rose
Art and Words by Martha Joy Rose
“Disruptions, Extrusions, and Other Chaotic Consequences”
PRODUCTION SITE
MOTHERING THE WORLD
This project started after I moved to the Artist Enclave of Historic Kenwood.
I’ve spent the better part of the last ten years championing other women’s work. Prior to that, I focused musically on “performance” art. During years of songwriting and concert-making ideas are projected outward in a noisy fashion. The work I’m engaging in now is very intimate and is more of a reflection than a projection.
I am interested in exploring my body is a site of production and reproduction. It is (and has been) a site of concept making and conception-formation. Through the years it has belonged to many people, including children, partners, governments, societies, country, state, church, and home. Some of these places are unique, and some are not. However, this basic premise is clear – my body has been a site of production and “making.”
As I began editing my thoughts for this project, I realized that I never said my body belongs to me. So, more than ever this fact becomes a justification for this work, which in so many ways, mirrors what so many women have been taught to feel –namely, that women’s bodies belong to others more than they belong to themselves. Now, in the era of the new Trump administration, this may be true more than ever. It is especially important to share the truth of what it is to bring forth another human, to nurture them, and to make my body a site of visible production and labor. I want to disrupt the “nice,” “perfectly groomed,” woman-mother-persona. Here she is. Stripped down: naked, bloody, imperfect, and old but still a work of art.
Martha Joy Rose, January 29, 2017
Joy Rose is part of the Artist Enclave of Historic Kenwood. Sheis a musician, concert promoter, museum founder, and fine artist. Her work has been published across blogs and academic journals and she has performed with her band Housewives On Prozac on Good Morning America, CNN, and the Oakland Art & Soul Festival to name a few. She is the NOW-NYC recipient of the Susan B. Anthony Award, her Mamapalooza Festival Series has been recognized as “Best in Girl-Power Events” in New York, and her music has appeared on the Billboard Top 100 Dance Charts. She founded the Museum of Motherhood in 2003, created the Motherhood Foundation 501c3 non-profit in 2005, saw it flourish in NYC from 2011-2014, and then pop up at several academic institutions. Her current live/work space in Kenwood St. Petersburg, Florida is devoted to the exploration of mother-labor as performance art.The upcoming date for the next Kenwood Artist Tour is March 18thand 19th, 2017 noon-5pm. See map and find out more and to tour the studios of participating St. Pete, Fla craftspeople:
The Disruptions, Extrusions, and Other Chaotic Consequences exhibit begins with an enhanced chest of drawers. Says Rose, “we are always trying to put everything in a box….Make it neat. Or, hide things away. Here is your chance to pick a secret or leave a secret behind.” There are also photographs of body parts, paintings, and mixed media with emerging dolls. You can visit the MOM Art Annex during the Kenwood Artist Tour.
Poem for Canvas Squat
I went out to the studio and sat on a canvas
I don’t know why except that everything that has sprung from my loins is fantastic.
Four amazing kids- now adults: Brody, Blaze, Ali, Zena.
Before that, lots of painful blood. Since them – ART!
If art is like giving birth, then let the creations be fantastic too. This is my pop squat.
Everything truly great has come from between my legs. Occasionally my throat, but, mostly from between my legs…. What have you got down there? Show the world.
https://m.soundcloud.com/electric-mommyland-1/electric-pussy
M.A.M.A. Issue n.21: Aga Gasiniak and Laura Sloan Patterson
The ProCreate Project, the Museum of Motherhood and the Mom Egg Review are pleased to announce the 21st edition of this scholarly discourse intersects with the artistic to explore the wonder and the challenges of motherhood. Using words and art to connect new pathways between the academic, the para-academic, the digital, and the real, as well as the everyday: wherever you live, work, and play, the Art of Motherhood is made manifest. #JoinMAMA
February, 2017 Aga Gasiniak and Laura Sloan Patterson
Art:
My creativity is a journey. My work is very intuitive and symbolic. I tell stories through my paintings. Paintbrushes, paints, varnishes and canvases are tools to describe emotions, colours and forms instead of words. Every painting is a glimpse of memory, place, stillness and natural beauty. Every painting is a story. One takes place of another almost simultaneously. Synchronicities happen also in art.
Painting requires taking risks, it is like a jump into deep water. The moment of emerging to the surface is pure happiness.
It is also a joy, need, relief, meditation, getting through and fixing, constant learning. It is a fear as well, journey, expression and act of self- love.
Painting helps me to feel the past moment of beauty, peace and happiness one more time. It is sometimes like time travel through parallel worlds. Past, present and future penetrate through the process of creating. I am here and there at the same time.
My inspirations are strangely almost seasonal and follow’s cycles in nature and life. They are: black and white photographs of remote places, electric posts, stars, children, moon, women, shells, seaside, driftwood , …feet, spirit and wild animals and all those things which are lost between words and images and could be found only through emotions. I leave the clues of my identity in the techniques and the subjects I use and the more I paint or create the more I become aware of it.
Creating is constantly affected by life changes. Everything is connected which leaves every painting with an emotional and personal touch. I painted my recent landscapes during pregnancy. They represent not only places and moments of stillness but also emotions related to expecting a first child, adapting to changes and getting through the journey of the pregnancy.
More About Aga:
Aga is a self-taught artist and finds that she is continually learning and evolving in her artwork.
Her current body of work is focused on Scottish landscapes and her son’s portraits.
Many of her images are inspired by visiting and taking photograph’s of Scottish landscapes and people whose stories or lives have had impact on her life.
Her art and creative process are an endless journey of experiences, feelings, ideas and thoughts.
Aga works with various mediums including watercolours, acrylics, pastels and oils.
Aga’s work was exhibited in Edinburgh and was published in ‘The Mother’ magazine.
Words:
The Giraffe by Laura Sloan Patterson from Mom Egg Review Vol. 14
Desperate Artwives Review
Review of Desperate Artwives Exhibition January 2017 – by Hazel Frizell Phd in “Representations of specific Concerne of the Women’s Liberation Movement in British Feminist Art 1970-1978”
My visit to the Desperate Artwives Exhibition could not have been more timely as it coincided with the Women’s March organised in London and other major cities in response to Trump’s inauguration and the issues his views raise for women.
The work on show by nineteen professionally trained female artists and created in various media reflects and questions their experiences as wives and mothers. Brought together by Amy Dignam, they all wanted to continue the creative process following childbirth and within the constraints of the domestic environment. The result is a largely autobiographical narrative both depicting and celebrating their personal experiences infused with the domestic.
Jane Helling’s “Sacred Heart Defect” is a display of several small hearts crafted from pretty fabrics softly stuffed to create 3D forms – which appear to be anatomically correct. In doing so she creates a tension between the rather impersonal meaning of anatomical drawings found in medical books and the very personal association of babies’ soft toys usually seen in prams and on play mats. The viewer thereby creates their own narrative – Is this about a precious child born with a heart defect? Instead of being comforting , the soft hearts bring to mind the anxiety experienced by the parent of a sick child – a more personal and poignant image than that of a medical journal. The term “Sacred Heart” for Roman Catholics refers to the heart of Christ and as such is regarded an object of devotion and perhaps here can be interpreted as reflecting the sacred meaning of a child to their mother.
Aliso n O’Neill’s video “Punctures” visibly, yet more strongly vocally, relays her experiences of miscarriage and childbirth. She focusses on the impersonal reaction of medical staff who simply issue her with a yellow booklet noting they are sorry she lost her baby. In hospital giving birth to her son is equally fraught with process driven behaviour from the nurses as she does not meet the stereotypical image of a mother due to her short cropped blond hair. The lack of control and isolation felt by O’Neill reflects the complaint frequently made that women are neither listened to nor treated as individuals by the medical profession while experiencing pregnancy and childbirth.
“Ephemera” by Sharon Reeves consists of six carbon copy scrolls produced in fine fabric and a carbon copy book both detailing in manual typewritten font parts of conversations exchanged between women. Here she expresses the fast moving snippets of conversation that are short lived yet often infused with emotion that there is no time to explore. They represent the fractured nature of communication between women frequently disturbed by the domestic environment and the multiple identities a mother has to adopt in her everyday life. Issues and emotions can lose their impact when expressed in stinted, shortened bursts. The type written scroll format is similar to that of Mary Kelly’s “Post-Partum Document” of 1974 – 1979 depicting the early years of her son.
Amy Dignam’s “Memory Box” is a delicate and poignant representation of maternal experience relating to each of her three children’s treasured small toys. They have been gilded and placed in a tea box to be displayed as objects of great importance as they relate to items essential to a particular time in her children’s lives. The gold leaf transforms them to the viewer into precious objects to be both kept and admired thus emphasising the importance of everyday experience.
The depiction of female experience and in particular motherhood was a prevailing theme in the work of feminist artist collectives formed as a result of their involvement with the Women’s Liberation Movement of the early 1970s. In particular, the domestic and female experience was depicted in Feministo’s work and was displayed in an exhibition aptly entitled “Portrait of the Artist as a Housewife” at the ICA in 1976. Both Feministo and the Desperate Artwives illustrate the importance of documenting female experience not only as a means of continuing the creative process but as a political tool. The issues facing women highlighted by the Women’s March remain as relevant now as they did in the days of second wave feminism.
