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

Laura Sloan Patterson
THE GIRAFFE
There is a cry across the hall. Not the toddler cry of I want, I hate, You will do it now, but an adult sob wrested into baby vowels. He squats on the floor, holding a rubber giraffe we once pretended French, a toy he hasn’t touched since early teething. He’s unearthed his own archeology, buried in a canvas bin, the culture of his babyhood, and there’s an electrical crackle of shock. He folds her neck rhythmically and with each chiropractic bend, her keening squeak, and tears squeezed from his eyes. He cannot stop—the squeezing or the crying. He used to squeeze her like that and laugh deep in his body. When he tips his face up to mine, I see that it has happened: he knows I’m useless. He’s two, the age of purest reason. But perhaps I am mistaken: was there another offense? Did they quarrel? Did she come home late, smelling of Snoopy and snow cones? I’ll kill that giraffe bitch, I think. But later, while my son sleeps. I’ll disembowel her and dance on her squeaker. Lying down at night, I see my boy’s eyes in that moment of looking up, dimensional tunnels of sorrow. I mentally gather my tools: kitchen scissors, X-Acto knife, trash bags. But in the early morning I wake and know: I could hack legions of rubber giraffes, slit the evil girlfriend’s tires, blackmail every admissions committee in the world. No use. It’s not them but a sadness sipped from my own placenta, grown in the calcium of his bones. He grips the giraffe like the last bitter tuber in a burned-out forest, a rhizome he must carry on from here.
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