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Art by Sarah Irvin

The Measurement Project
Each day of pregnancy, Sarah measured her stomach at navel height with a piece of yarn. The Measurement Project is the accumulation of this daily ritual.

Prose by Anelie Crighton

Pregnant with meaning

Pregnancy, as experienced, is not a metaphor, but a challenge: those solid thumps to the ribcage are reminders that much as you might like to think of yourself as a brain on a stick, an intellect tethered to the complex technology that is the body, you are in fact a placental mammal. You need to work? No, you need to nap. You want to stride along like you always did, long straight steps, fast and confident? By week 30 it will be all you can do not to waddle.
My walking mantra is, ‘There is nothing wrong with your legs. There is nothing wrong with your legs.’ This is strictly true. There is, however, something wrong with my feet (swollen), pelvis (slowly disconnecting), lower back (hurting), stomach muscles (stretched), blood pressure (low) and brain (sorry?). My horizons have gradually contracted. My slow pace and ready fatigue make the ten minute tram ride into the centre of town seem the equal of a day-long trek. At home I must intersperse activity with rest, reaching for another glass of iced water while I prop up my comically puffy feet. I feel hot all the time, and am immensely fond of very cold drinks and ice cream. Very cold ice cream drinks are also acceptable.
The tenant has been excellent company. Once his movements were detectable at 22 weeks, his wriggles and stretches and somersaults were delightful. While he still had the room he moved rapidly and erratically, brief flutterings and jabs like the strangest indigestion you’ve ever had. As he’s grown, his reachings have slowed, become more definite, more obviously in response to changes in his environment. Any time I lean forward, a small foot firmly reminds me that he does not appreciate cramped lodgings. I have pointed out that at 5’10” I offer quite spacious accommodation, but the kicks continue.
One day my husband caught a glimpse of me dressing and said in wonder, ‘You look beautiful.’ I found this astonishing; I look like a woman who’s swallowed a basketball, perhaps to distract attention from her thick ankles and dry hair. I have had a protruding belly for months yet still misjudge my movements, my round new boundary regularly encountering table edges and door frames. Numerous sleepless nights have hung a crescent under each eye. The fit of my voluminous maternity pants gets a little more snug each week. There is beauty here?
Observed and observing, one’s progress is constantly at issue – are you gaining weight, feeling worse, sleeping less? Is the baby growing longer and fattening up, does it move ten times an hour twice a day? Once you’ve exhausted the present, the future beckons: that unpredictable day (early? late?) when the contractions begin, and the x hours thereafter when you’ll breathe and relax and finally make up your mind about an epidural.

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Art by Beth Goobic

Metamorphose is an ongoing conversation in clay about the journey of becoming a mother and being a mother. It takes place in this study of a common utilitarian household item, the mug. These mug forms are endowed with the presence of both vulnerability and strength. They celebrate the glorified transformation of the pregnant body, but they bring visibility and conversation to the continuing transformation of the body and person after birth. That they are mugs points to the commonness of everyday lived experiences by wo/men in motherhood and motherwork. Each mug is entirely different reflecting the fact that the experience of mothering is unique to each individual person, even though motherwork is quite often mistaken as a universal concept. These kinds of assumptions about the universality of mothering actually makes the personal experiences of each person doing it invisible. Metamorphose is meant to resist that kind of assumption. The mugs are a reflection of the pregnant body, the very beginning of the anatomical journey of the female body as it enters motherhood but the mugs also celebrate and acknowledge the transformation of the female body after pregnancy, post birth, which in our society, is a less celebrated transformation, and a less visible journey. Post birth bodies deserve the patience, celebration and glorification that childbearing bodies receive. Post-birth bodies are spacious, healing and rehabilitating, while still maintaining a new additional life. The mugs acknowledge, give presence, and beautify the body post birth. These mug forms acknowledge the more subtle but continual anatomical journey our bodies endure during motherwork and also a person’s transformative and altering personal journey throughout motherwork. Pertaining to motherwork this conversation in clay is not exclusive to birth mothers, but opens up this conversation to all caregivers that take on motherwork. A man, or a non-biological parent may not physically go through the birthing journey but that person can experience the altering and changing of their own bodies and spirits throughout the journey of motherwork. The common daily motions endured during motherwork, and the effects and marks that motherwork experiences leave on our bodies are also portrayed here in these mugs. With the unknown journey and struggles that each child brings, caregivers are altered in person as they journey with that child through the highs and lows of each experience. This altering of person throughout the lifelong journey of motherhood, so private and personal, joyful and painful, messy and beautiful is celebrated and acknowledged in these basic everyday utilitarian objects. Like motherwork, the mugs are individual, unique and beautifully imperfect. The forms are altered, and asymmetrical, with undulating rims and drippy glazes. I choose to alter the form as a way to represent and interpret how we are altered in person and body in motherwork. The mugs are fired in a salt and soda kiln resulting in much surface variation among the cups. Each of these mugs are a functional sculpture and an experience, inviting the viewer to apply their own experiences in motherhood and motherwork to the conversation. The vulnerable yet commanding forms salute the invisible labor of caregiving and everyday experiences of motherwork, which involves a metamorphosis of person and body. Metamorphose is an artistic attempt to make the invisibility of motherhood and mother-work visible in households and workspaces via an everyday utilitarian object.

Words by Nancy Cook

Close to the Heart

I am planning the perfect tattoo. Where to have it applied is not in question: It is going to cover my entire chest. But beyond that, I have some decisions to make.
My relationship with my breasts has always been complicated. So much different than Joel’s relationship with his penis. Joel’s penis has a name. The penis is named Max, basic and simple. Max has a personality, so Joel believes, a life of its own, completely separate from Joel’s. Well, not completely separate, of course. Our son Aaron views his little penis in much the same way. Aaron thinks his penis is his friend, although he hasn’t given it (him?) a name. Joel is convinced this is evidence of relational capacity. I say if you are in conversation with a body part, addressing it as Other, that’s distancing, not intimacy. But to be candid, I don’t care enough to get into a real discussion about it.
It’s strange to me because my breasts have always been part of the integrated whole that is my body. This was true even before I had real breasts, when I was a kid pushing my flat chest up and out so I could look like my Mom or Charlie’s Angels or Madonna. I’d check out my reflection in a mirror or a sun-glared store window, and there they’d be, future boobs, more real than imaginary. It’s like my body always knew breasts would be part of the family, and now they’re participants in a full-fledged collaboration, right in there with my ears, my toes, my heart. My body parts communicate pretty well, the soles to the brain, the nostrils to the spine, the nipples on direct-dial to the vulva. My breasts are as essential as, and no more essential than, other parts, say, my tongue or my hands.
At the same time, I’ve often felt as if these beauties were not mine alone. They’re so, you know, out there. Visible. Available for public notice. Something like marigolds in a house-front flower bed or news of winning even a minor prize. Joel would probably take issue with that. He likes that he has private viewings. He coos, he tastes. Sometimes he plays them, left side against the right. He might grasp tightly, squeeze hard, but never roughly. I understand Joel’s attraction to my breasts, if not his proprietariness. I like personal time with my breasts too. They are nice to touch and very responsive. Especially when an effort is made.

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Art:

Home In/Out (2010) by Ruchika Wason Singh

Presenting my works from the project Home In/Out for this M.A.M.A. issue makes me introspect about my art and its intuitive process. From the vantage point of an artist-mother, I am now at a stage of reflection. The exercise of relooking, sorting and selecting the works for the presentation is a departure from exercising my dual identity in creating my work, to utilizing it for re-searching its creative implications. It has brought me to ask myself a question (which, during the process of creation, was superseded by the spontaneity of emotive expression). How has motherhood impacted my art process? It is with this in mind that I look back at my project Home In/Out.
My identity as an artist-mother (or mother-artist) has deeply influenced my art. Perhaps its most important role has been to generate maternal emotions within me and the need to creatively express these at the same time. This is obvious from the fact that often, the stages of my life and the phases in my art have run parallel to each other. Pregnancy and motherhood created room, first for embodied experience, and then for physical and emotional interactions with my daughter Meher. Each stage brought some or all of the experiences of anticipation, curiosity, ecstasy and anxiety. It introduced my ‘biological other’ (my daughter) in my life, because of whom I have had to find a new equilibrium in my identity. For instance, while mothering, the artist in the mother occasionally struggled to find time for making art. At other times, the mother in the artist emerged as a fount for contextual and visual resources for artistic creation. Motherhood thus created a ground for experiences which were both physiological and emotional, obvious yet mysterious, all of which needed a release.
Post-pregnancy, the home became the site for a constantly evolving maternal performance in the everyday, and this began to evolve as a subject matter in my art too. The joys and anxieties of mothering Meher started surfacing as artistic concerns, thematically and often materially. In Home In/Out the binaries of the inside and the outside allude to the ‘home’ within and outside the body of the mother, though I am primarily concerned with the latter. At the same time it also deals with the idea of the home within the domestic space and the social space beyond it. Beyond the womb and the placenta, the exterior space in the larger world is the new ‘home’: the domestic and the social space, in which the relationship with the biological other is established, constructed and evolved. This new home outside of the mother’s body (mine) becomes a region of care that is naturally nurturing, and also subject to socially and culturally constructed maternal anxieties; to which the mother in the artist (in me) responds and the artist in the mother (in me) re-responds. Questions and concerns related to the upbringing and welfare of my daughter which confronted me during care giving, nurturing and feeding, were transmuted into an artistic quest, leading to drawings in conté and charcoal, etchings, oil paintings and installations with found objects. The anxieties of mothering a daughter hence re-emerge in literally different forms; the vulnerability of the girl child becomes a central question in art as in life.
Mothering also blurred the boundaries of the studio and home, making mothering and art creation seem intertwined. This happens, for instance, in installations where the act of procuring groceries, and that of procuring art materials, blur into one another, as rice grains, cooking ladles, spices and containers from the kitchen (amongst other materials) become testimonies for my maternal emotions (which I sought to route through cooking and feeding), as well as a re-creation of maternal memories. Apart from their daily, utilitarian function, the objects now perform a (different sort of) creative function, which, nevertheless, also harks back to their original meaning. Therefore, these objects serve as actual, physical metonymies expressing the relationship between my daughter and me. In other artworks, forms from Meher’s kindergarten and pre-teen years, such as candies, alphabets and Barbie dolls, metamorphosed into botanical forms; through them, I celebrated the new ‘girly’ world of my daughter, while also perhaps reliving my own past as a young girl.
Motherhood thus gave me the privilege to question, re-imagine and perceive anew the world I inhabit, through sharing it with my daughter. Her presence in my life has helped evolve both the artist and the mother in me.

WORDS:
BURST by Kristin Procter

I

There is a skill of precision required in judging the right moment to twist the tap, and stop the flow of water stretching the bulbous balloon to its limit. Too little liquid and the ammunition will roll, dry and harmless, belly up in the grass – dud. Too much pressure and the little rubber ring that kisses the tap will be torn from its pregnant womb, launching the attack on yourself – spurt.

II

In the eggshell tub, she floats her moon belly back over her knees to hero’s pose, head tipped to the sky, eating piano snowflakes with her persimmon cheeks and tomato tongue. She beckons her baby with body and breath. She opens; her fingers expand around the curve of his collapsible skull, as he breaks to the surface, erupting from water, to water, to arms.

III

Martha Stewart dismantles pomegranates online. She slices the sphere into two lobes, each of which in turn she cradles in her hand before swiftly striking the flesh with a large wooden mixing spoon. She insists this is not spanking, but as the tender red insides fall into a pile on the table, I can’t help but wonder how exactly Martha spanks.

IV

Dangling fingers like bait in a fish farm, she trawls for shimmer in her drawer of delicates. She pushes aside armpit high monthly mom pants. Her pinkie hooks a long forgotten key lime G-string, with a lace ruffle and history that quicken her pulse. She slips off her track pants and wiggles back into her sexuality. In front of the full length mirror, it is difficult to say which pops first, her eyes or the undergarments’ over-extended waistband. Either way, her hip stings and her ankles have been swallowed by a polyester green tree snake.

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