M.A.M.A. Issue n.8: Cynthia Patton and Sarah Nicolls
The ProCreate Project, the Museum of Motherhood and the Mom Egg Review are pleased to announce the 8th 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
NOV, 1ST WAITING FOR WORDS CYNTHIA PATTON – FEATURING THE ART OF SARAH NICOLLS
Art:
MOMENTS OF WEIGHTLESSNESS by Sarah Nicolls
The show takes my Inside-Out Piano as its starting point and explores the metaphorical parallels of making a unique piano and becoming a mum. I push, ratchet and swing the piano during the show, using the piano as part of the domestic furniture to travel into different moments of parenthood. Combining lyrical music, movement, narrative and a grand piano played like you’ve never seen before, I tell my story of becoming a mother.
WAITING FOR WORDS Cynthia Patton – From Mom Egg Vol. 11 “Mother Tongue”
I was in bed when Katie slipped past, heading for the stairs. My slender, caramel-haired daughter didn’t look at me or speak. She was a shadow, receding with the dawn.
I huddled beneath the down comforter, filled with foggy, nameless emotions. I knew I should go downstairs and engage her as the specialists instructed me. Make good use of our precious free time. With an autistic child there’s always something to work on: social skills, sign language, speech. Instead a prayer rose unbidden. Please give me words. I can do without hugs and kisses, but I need more words, need them like air.
Katie was five yet spoke like a two-year-old—when she spoke at all. A knot lodged between my shoulder blades. What if conversation never came? Katie was smart enough, but speech remained a challenge. Her mind was a secret garden, the thoughts overflowing with nowhere to go. I wanted to hear her stories, her emotions, her feeble attempts at jokes. I wanted her to look at me, smile, and say Mommy.
I released the breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. My tears rained down as I prayed for the day the words broke free, flooding fallow fields.
Katie was nonverbal for two years, eight months. At three, after a year of intensive therapy, she had a spoken vocabulary of 50 words. By four she used two-word phrases. By five she assembled short sentences.
Special needs parenting is often a strange blend of gratitude, sorrow, pride, and guilt. I was excited and proud when Katie mastered a new sentence. Yet I was sad she had to work so hard and guilty I wanted more. Why couldn’t I simply be grateful? I was, but when I looked in her eyes I saw an IQ boiling, just out of reach, and wanted to smash something on her behalf.
It’s hard to watch your child struggle, especially when there’s nothing to do but wait.
At six Katie answered simple questions. By seven she used adjectives and worked to master possessive pronouns. I fought for additional speech therapy and finally the long, slow slog ended. Her speech gained momentum.
One night shortly after she turned eight, Katie asked for the blue dolphin as she climbed into bed. Her words were crystal clear, so I praised her as the therapists trained me.
She asked again, and I showed her the blue cat.
“No,” she said. “Want dolphin please.”
“We don’t have a dolphin.”
“Dolphins swim in the water.”
“You’re right,” I said. “They’re good swimmers.”
I reached into the basket that contained her stuffed animals. “Do you want the lobster?”
Katie smiled and reached for the toy. She played with the pinchers while I felt smug about discovering the glitch where her brain veered off course.
She looked up. “This is red. Red lobster.”
“I know, but it lives in the water.”
Her pained look said I was the one with the neurological problem. “I want blue dolphin.”
She clenched her teeth—the beginning of a tantrum. I thought fast. “Why don’t you pick the animal you want to sleep with?”
This wasn’t the routine. After a long pause she rolled out of bed, rooted in the basket, and yanked something out. I laughed when I saw Eeyore. “That’s not a dolphin. It’s a donkey.”
“Blue donkey,” she said, climbing into bed.
Katie knows the difference between a dolphin and a donkey. Sometimes her brain scrambles the words.
We recited Goodnight Moon while Katie stroked Eeyore’s ears. I said, “I love you” as my hand automatically made the sign.
She signed I love you as Max, our cat, entered the room. “Good night, sweetie. Max says good night too.”
“Goodnight, Mommy.”
I froze, unsure I’d heard correctly. Katie had never spontaneously greeted anyone. She could say the words, but I needed to coax them out.
Max meowed, and Katie giggled. “Good talking, Max.”
She’d done it, twice in one night. I wanted to cry and shout and jump on the bed.
So what if it happened a few years late? So what if it wouldn’t happen again for months?
These moments sustain me.
A few months later, I was reading yet another progress report. Katie was in the kitchen studying cookbook photos. “That’s soup. Soup is hot. I like soup. Soup is good. I can make it. I’m stirring soup. Let’s make chicken tortilla soup.”
She flipped the page and talked about pumpkin pie. I didn’t know she knew what pumpkin pie was. More pages flipped, followed by a long discourse on chocolate cake, then meat, then pasta, then salad with cranberries. It was as if she wanted to say every sentence she could that included the particular food item.
To say I was stunned would be an understatement.
It went on for 15 minutes, maybe longer.
I listened as the words poured out, barely breathing. Then it hit me. This was it, the moment I’d been waiting for. The words were breaking free, spilling into the kitchen and filling up the room.
They filled me up. Better than any meal.
Cynthia Patton is an award-winning author, speaker, advocate, and attorney, and founder of Autism A to Z, a nonprofit organization.
Sarah Nicolls, Mother-Pianist
What your work focuses on today?
I am about to start touring my theatre/music show Moments of Weightlessness, featured here, beginning on 28th November in Oxford. The show takes my Inside-Out Piano as its starting point and explores the metaphorical parallels of making a unique piano and becoming a mum. I push, ratchet and swing the piano during the show, using the piano as part of the domestic furniture to travel into different moments of parenthood.
How has your pregnancy affected you as an artist? Did you feel particularly driven? How the world around you reacted?
I don’t think pregnancy affected me particularly as an artist: frankly, I was too busy trying to get all my work finished! I did enjoy the blossoming effect. I also discovered the ‘public property’ aspect of being pregnant (my bump seemed quite large, so everyone told me I was definitely having “boy twins TOMORROW”!). It got slightly tiring but then I tried to keep absolutely positive about that, thinking it’s nice that everyone gets excited about a new life. Perhaps the same way we are all trained by the news to consider deaths that are not related to us. Maybe there should be more birth stories on the news…?!
What changed when you became a mother?
After the initial period of shock/dreaminess/night-and-day blur, I became much more efficient at doing work, using nap times to quickly get on with things. But then, very gradually, life changes fundamentally in so many ways.
What do you feel changed in your creative process?
Though at first it was about efficiency – doing more, faster – it became more about being brave enough to simply express things. Birth itself is a dramatic experience and there was a lot to process as a result of that. I think motherhood has made my confidence grow, has made me more political, perhaps thinking about the bigger picture more. I find I have less patience for idiotic ways of doing things (though I was probably fairly impatient before!).
I had the new piano built right when my second child, Sylvie, was born. What was surprising was that it could swing: I wasn’t expecting that at all. I had asked for the piano (a full-sized grand piano, with the strings turned vertically up from the keyboard, so 2.5m tall) to be so that I could move it myself. This meant getting it from vertical to horizontal – and that’s 180kg of piano, on my own. So the builders made a pivot frame that I could ratchet up and down, with this point around which it could rotate. The incredible wonder of seeing an entire grand piano moving freely through the air seemed to me to fit so fully with creating new life: the motivations we have to design and build something go into a new realm once the thing takes on its own life. We imagine what life with children will be like but really there’s no comprehension of how totally and fully it will absorb us: through mad levels of exhaustion (right now for example my eyes are actually hurting, they’re so tired!), through a deep change in lifestyle: no nipping out for a pint with your partner or trips to the cinema (always the cliched example from parents when we were first pregnant); but also the deep desire to be with your kids, the feeling that if you miss a day with them you feel quite desperate to get home again, the desire to make space for just you and you little family to be together; and the amazement of seeing how humans grow and develop: how language is acquired, seeing where humour comes from; experiencing literally the insanity of the forming brain up close.
So, I began to take on this quite different approach to my own work which was much more biographical, much more explicit, using words, action, movement to investigate both the new instrument and the new lives in my life.
Do you think you gained inspiration out of this transforming experience?
Absolutely. It would be hard to be unaffected by it! It’s so personal yet universal and the feeling one gets from talking to other new mums is reassuring and totally levelling: everyone experiences the same things yet it’s also so intimate, deep and personal.
Strengths and weaknesses of being at once a mother and an artist.
Being tired is hard! Creativity doesn’t fit neatly into an hour here or there very well. The possibly selfish – or, in any case, self-absorbed expansiveness of creative exploration is very hard to do within nursery hours. I find I really miss the unending evening work, where you could just run with an idea until midnight or beyond and that would be fine. Someone said to me recently that actually it’s better to just honour how you work best and if that means going on a 5 day residency, then maybe that’s what you have to do. I thought this was really interesting and empowering because some mother groups look into how mothering can happen alongside or simultaneously to creativity but for me, each is more successful when fed by the other but not trying to happen at the same time!
Expectations for the future?
We hope to move somewhere with more outside space, so I imagine the kids running around or digging or climbing whilst I’m in my studio, exploring ideas..! I hope I’ll do more theatrical work with the piano but also just lots of piano-based work too: trying to see what sounds I can extract from my Inside-Out Piano. I’ve recently stopped protesting as much when others call me a composer, though starting a new trajectory is very challenging, scary, slow and fulfilling. I imagine life like a forest: a series of trees which we climb. When we reach the top of one tree and can look out on the rest then it’s at that moment that I see another tree to jump to and go there. Sounds exhausting, doesn’t it?!
www.sarahnicolls.com
Procreate Project, Launch and Exhibition - Call for mother-artists
PROCREATE PROJECT, LAUNCH AND EXHIBITION – over 100 MOTHER -ARTISTS
ProCreate Project is due to launch at the Women´s Art Library/Make at Goldsmiths College, University of London, on Tuesday the 15th of December 2015.
Exhibition | Visual Poetry | Talks | Presentations
The Launch Event for Procreate Project: An empowering event celebrating the art of motherhood, featuring over 100 Mother-Artists. The exhibition will be accompanied by an innovative art-studio model presentation and by a panel discussion on subjects including art and maternity, from an artistic, academic and neurobiological standpoint.
The challenge of the exhibition is to display an unrestricted number of internationally submitted artworks, creating a site specific installation that manages to showcase all of the contributing artists. The installation consists of a collection of photozines, which can either document or translate the artists’ works into the book format. Thus allowing the display of performances and visual artists alike. The installation draws upon the context in which it will be shown – The Women’s Art Library –at the same time as creating an alternative archive for Procreate Project. Therefore, the audience is invited to read and interact with it as with a growing, living archive.
Talks:
Artists, academics, curators and researchers; an open conversation to expand the knowledge on the topic of motherhood, birth, femininity and women in the arts. We would like to explore further this deeply changing experience and how, by challenges, this reflects on the artist' work; how it can make it some how richer, braver. To overcome the misunderstanding of this process, we will be offering solutions while giving examples of extraordinary motherhood activities and art/hard - works for a more positive future and more space for women in the arts. Schedule: 2.45 pm Welcome and introduction from founder, Dyana Gravina 3.00 pm Presentation of photozine installation by Lara Gonzalez (artist, researcher) 3:15 pm Elena Marchevska (interdisciplinary artist, researcher, organiser of Motherhood and Creative Practice Conference 2015) 3:30 pm Video talk by Ana Alvarez Arreclade (visual artist) 3:45 pm Elisa Terren (actress) 4:00 pm Anna Ehnold Danailov (theatre director, artistic director of Prams in the Hall, co-founder of Parents in Performing Arts Campaign) 4.15pm Lecture performance by Mila Oshin, (artist, writer, the Project After Birth founder and curator) 4:30 pm Break 4:45pm Matilda Layser, (multidisciplinary artist, writer, founder of Mothers Who Make) 5.00 pm Ivana Bartoletti(chair of the Favian Women’s Network, founder Fabiana magazine) 5:15 pm Rose Gibbs (artist, writer, feminist activist, curator of The Reproduction of Motherhood) 5:30 pm Martina Mullaney(artist, researcher, founder of Enemies of Good Art) 6.00 pm Louiza Polyzogopoulou, Simbiosi Architects (creator of the Procreate Project Art studio/crèche 3D model
Talks: 4pm to 6pm
Watch this space to know more about the full programme!
More about the Installation:
The model is taken from the project Made and published (by artist Lara Gonzalez), which works with the Hybrid book format. The Hybrid book format, it is digital and material, can be read on-line and they can be download from a PDF format and bound. It is presented with binding instructions, which allows the reader to engage with the structure of the downloaded and printed book. So, the audience invests time rather than money if they want to engage with the physical form of the book.
Moreover, they can be shared, distributed through social networks, downloaded in multiples and displayed, to be taken away. It acknowledges the possibility to disturb the commercial flow of both publishing and art practise; it is a democratic publishing method that can be made (and published) by all.
Any art form welcome!
Submission deadline December 1st, 2015
Please include:
– 1 to 8 images (high resolution jpg)
– text/statement in support of the art (up to 250 words)
– link to your website/blog
This is a free of charge opportunity. However any donation is welcome and it will ensure further support and space for mothers (-to-be) – artists and to further Procreate Project’s development.
More about Procreate Project:
ProCreate Project is a platform aiming to provide practical help and financial support for artists, enabling them to continue producing work during
We aim to help artists build and combine their new existence as mothers with their practice.
Mission
– Build a platform that can provide practical help and financial support for artists and help artists build and combine their existence as mothers with their practice.
– Connect artists with the forefront of creative business, creating networks and links with relevant movements, scenes and diverse niche groups.
– Support, showcase and promote artist’s projects through on and off line events, activities and campaigns.
– Develop communities that encourage open discussions between mother-artists and audience.
– Provide space, facilities and drop-in childcare services to enable creative development.
For more information, please visit https://www.procreateproject.com/ or send an e mail at info@indietobe-test-two.co.uk