Procreate Project - New Commissions 2020 Announcement
We are delighted to announce the ten awards to develop new ambitious works and support artists whose work and lives have been impacted by this time of isolation and extra domestic/care responsibilities.
Procreate Project supports the development of contemporary artists who are also mothers, working across disciplines. Thanks to the support of the Emergency Response funds from Arts Council England, we are able to award a £1000 each to ten artists selected between 172 submissions received via an open call.
The awarded artists’ projects are:
– Cash Aspeek
Insideout ( working title) – Photography and public art project
Personal Protective Equipment has become a new normal during this pandemic. They are designed to reduce, often unseen, risks, toxins, fumes, or viruses.
Through images and self-made PPE garments, the artist aims to reduce the perceived risk and enable her daughter, who has recently been diagnosed with autism and has been willingly self isolating for the past four years, to access the outside world.
“This prolonged self-isolation has impacted on motherhood……….. As my daughter’s friendships have fallen away, I also find my own support networks slip.”
The artist will create the protective garment from Flexible Silver and Mylar Film, both highly reflective materials similar in quality to space blankets used to protect after sports events and emergency situations. The material will reflect the surroundings, which becomes an alternative view on its surface, highlighting her daughter’s perception of the outside world.
– Dagmara Bilon
Hungry for human contact – webspace & social art experiment
‘Now, it has been made illegal to have sex with someone outside your household, with the rules being put into place from June 1. Anyone caught breaking the law could face having a criminal record.“ A booty call with that guy you dated for three months last year” is very much not on the list. Nor is “a nightly visit to the nearby flat of the girl/boyfriend you’re not ready to cohabitate with yet”. And don’t even think about going on a date, unless it’s virtual. ‘(Eleanor Steafal, The Telegraph, June 2020)‘Hungry for human contact’ aims to shed a light and push through spheres of loneliness. The project opens up possibilities for human contact outside the ‘ordinary’ encounters and investigates sexuality and intimacy during Covid-19, when dating, sex (unless its virtual) is illegal in the UK. But why do people join Tinder during a pandemic in the first place? What are people looking for?The final artwork will manifest in a webspace storing documentation of Tinder chats between artist Dagmara Bilon (Corona) and her Tinder matches, which include people of all genders and sexual identities. The diverse conversations with various individuals seek to investigate and give insight into people’s current circumstance during the time of the pandemic, the human condition of loneliness, desire, fantasies and invitation for creative interventions, to ‘make art instead of sex’.
– Henny Burnett
Touch-me-not – Photography, Mixed Media
“The Touch-me-not plant is associated with the treatment of vaginal and uterine complaints, inflammations and skin disorders”‘Touch-me-not’ is about skin and ageing process, touch and body politics. Drawn from a personal experience, the artist will use it to investigate the relationship and representation of the female body during and after the postnatal period. For her, this ‘skin growth’ had been caused by the stress her skin had undergone during pregnancy resulting in premature ageing. Suddenly, once touchable skin had become untouchable, rough and unsightly. The Photographic portraits of her torso affected by seborrheic keratosis will be projected onto a tablecloth and re-photographed. The introduction of the tablecloth into the work’s imagery relates to family history, as the Irish linen came from her grandmother. (There are suggestions that seborrheic keratosis could be hereditary). The lace of the tablecloth becomes embedded into the skin adding a further textured layer. The final diptych of images will be screen-printed using thermo-chromic inks. The ink responds to heat: when touched an imprint of the hand may be left fleetingly on the print. Stitching and piercing into the print surface would emphasise the raised quality of seborrheic keratosis. Latex examination gloves should be used to touch the ink surface reinforcing suggestions of clinical examination, and an untouchable status.
– Beatriz Cabur
‘Childbirth-19’ – Digital theatre
Childbirth-19 is a new digital theatre play specifically written to be performed online. The play depicts childbirth in times of Covid-19 and tackles how the experience of pregnancy and labour is shaped by systemic trauma, as due to coronavirus, childbirth interventions and mistreatments have increased, disregarding women’s needs and rights. Major traumas and long lasting damages have been inflicted in the name of minor risk prevention, leaving women without birth partners, not allowing home births, having midwifery led units, ultimately not giving choices to women on where and how to give birth and separating babies from their parents right after birth. “We continue to be contacted by women being told they cannot have a maternal request caesarean and we are concerned that in some places coronavirus is being used as an excuse to dictate to women how they should give birth, which contravenes Nice [the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence] guidance” – Maria Booker, from Birthrights for The Independent.Changing these circumstances is a pharaonic task to face. By collecting the stories of many women who have given birth during the COVID-19 pandemic, and translate them into a monologue for digital theatre, Childbirth-19 will try to make a difference.
“I alone can’t change the world but I can cast a stone across the waters to create many ripples, let Childbirth-19 be that stone.”
– Jane Cheadle
‘The quality of her silence: make your failures visible’ – experimental animation
An experimental animation project based on two analogue film reels inherited from the artist’s grandfather, an amateur film maker and inter-war economic migrant from Europe to Africa. Over half a century old and originally titled ’Tribal Africa’, the film’s ethnographic documentation of women in villages is testimony to a both colonial and patriarchal gaze. Conscious that these legacies reverberate into our present, we ask if these ideas are held together through image and filmic representation then in what ways can they be pulled apart? What forms or narrative might result from an irreversible and aggressive yet poetic manipulation of the physical film medium itself? The project aims to form part of a collaborative response and will be supported along the way by critical friend and collaborating artist Mary Martins and the South African poet Busiswe Mahlangu.
– Laura Eldret
‘Whispers’ – new textile and moving-image
Laura Eldret will produce a new textile and moving-image work. Whispers (2020) will be the result of a series of conversations with mothers, which also relates more broadly to human relationships and attachment at a time of social distancing.
The title draws on the idea of a whisper as a means of soothing speech, touching on issues of intimacy and care, and of speech as something embodied and physical. Both the textile work and the moving image work will explore the patterns and rhythms of interactions of mothers with their children, looking at the viscerality of their exchange and lived bodies and how this unique coexistence is emphasized during the first year after birth and during times of lockdown and isolation. To create the work, Eldret will use ethnographic processes and also draw on her own experience as a mother. Eldret’s work explores the social agency of art and aesthetic elements that bind people. Her practice uses processes of social engagement, anthropology and documentary. Fabric is a reoccurring form in her practice, she is interested in its social characteristics, its ability to wrap, comfort, soften, shield, conceal and display. She also frequently works with video to create works that engage in ethnographic processes such as interviews, observation, participation and reimagining.
– Wanja Kimani
‘Private Protest’ – mixed media, video performance
Artist Wanja Kimani will operate between the personal and the political, exploring the idea of a protest within the domestic space. Using video as a form of documentation of performative works utilizing barkcloth and found materials, Wanja will create images that reflect her body and the women around her. Through a collective intergenerational work, she will draw on the body as a site of transmission.
Monthly cycles of hormones, shedding potential life.
Soaked and drained way.
Death confronts black bodies from so many fronts.
How do we (ad)dress the internal civil war?
– Melanie Jackson
‘Spekyng Rybawdy’ – Art Publication
Melanie Jackson will be creating an art publication composed of drawings inspired by a particular set of medieval obscenities known as the ‘bawdy badges’. They challenge us, and demand our attention in the present because they continue to arrest us with their shocking modernity and radical otherness.
Pilgrim Badges were small, mass-produced pewter or lead-alloy brooches and trinkets, cheap to buy, of which hundreds survive from the late Middle Ages and many are based on religious motifs and saints. A sub group are a series of secular badges known as the erotic/sexual or bawdy badges which employ a diverse, entertaining array of images including visual references to linguistic puns, visual allusions to aspects of religious and social life, and persistent images of mobility. Above all, the sexual badges delight in hybrid creations. They represent subverted gendered modes of asserting power and control over the inscrutable, vital, yet precarious forces of sex, fertility, and reproduction – satirical of the castration anxieties expressed in both anti catholic propaganda and the post-plague witch trials and pamphlets of the day. The violence of sexual control is made explicit, simultaneously iterated, subverted, made absurd.
Instead of using obscenity to subordinate and demean, can we utilize its transgressive power to give voice to those who are marginalized, to engender empathy for those who are wounded, and consider new paradigms for negotiating desire?
– Anna Perach
Bluebeard [working title] – Textile, Sculptural performance
Looking back at Freud’s identified new emotional state exclusive to women, hysteria, the artist wants to explore and question how female emotions and intuition is depicted as a physical defect or internal illness that needs to be cured and controlled. Through her work Anna wants to reclaim the women’s needs and right for space and expression against a history of women’s emotional and sexual repression. The artist will give life to hand-tufted head masks through a performance inspired by an illustration by Wisnlow Homer made for Charles Perrault’s Tale of Bluebeard (1697). In the tale, a young woman married to an elderly disfigured man, opens a door of which she was given the key to but forbidden the access. In the room she discovers the remains of her husband’s 6 previous dead wives who had previously dared to open the forbidden door, a fate now awaiting her. Homer’s image depicts the heads of seven women hanging by their long hair on a rope. The artist interprets this image as a forced disconnection of women from their ‘wild, hysterical nature’ by means of violent separation from their bodies. Metaphorically these women no longer have their bodies to perform their anguish and thus they are cured from feeling.
– Holly Stevenson
‘What Does It Mean To Mother?’ – Ceramic Sculptures
Through the process of art making, and informed by the collective responses gathered from a group of mothers and artists with materially driven practices, Holly will investigate ‘what does it mean to mother?’ With a profound interest in psychoanalysis, the artist aims to offer interpretations and a view on the different experiences of mothering considering and questioning the idea of the ‘good enough mother’, first coined in 1953 by paediatrician and psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott. Resulting in a series of ceramic sculptures, Holly will glean language and forms that relate art making to mothering and mothering to art making, choosing the material of ‘clay’ as meaning for nurturing, labour intensive and unpredictable practices.
M.A.M.A. Issue n.42: Afrooist and Wendy Carolina Franco
Procreate Project, the Museum of Motherhood and the Mom Egg Review are pleased to announce the 42nd 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 #artandmotherhood
July 2020: Art by Afrooist, Words Wendy Carolina Franco
Art by Sunshine Negyesi aka Afrooist
“This is a time of grieving but also a time of great change. Covid and the emergence of the BLM movement, served as a reminder that anything is possible. Never in a million years could we have predicted such unprecedented change. So as I watch the old structures crumble I am reminded this is a period of infinite possibilities. The question now, is what world, what legacy, what vision I would I like to plant for the next generation.”
The most recent work of London based artist Afrooist, is a candid investigation into generational trauma. Her work reflects a personal journey of inquiry into her own family history, addressing the traumas which were entangled with the legacy of Colonialism .
Her work is fragmentary, working from big things which are edited down through various processes. These fragments relate to a bigger unseen picture, a remnant of something which has happened. Her art is the product of a performance where the unseen act of making is testified by her pieces.
She works across different media, ranging from live performances, painting and sculpture- using the poetry of hammering, beating, pulling, teasing and breaking, to express how her life has been lived and soaked in contrast. Her earlier works try to understand her black identity as it has been interpreted by society embracing the conflict revealed within the final pieces reflect the beautiful ugly of existence, that which is both attractive and repulsive, disquieting and squeamish, setting the viewer in an entanglement of something mucky, gritty yet sublime.
More about Afrooist
Born in London 1983, Afrooist was raised in a biracial family in Tooting, South London. Her mother is Filipino and father from Guyana . She studied classical studies at Warwick University ( 2005 ) and trained as an early years teacher at Greenwich University ( 2016 ). Artist and singer, she began as a self taught painter, and developed the ability to deconstruct and reflect on her practice whilst studying Fine arts at City Lit London (2018). During the Summer of 2019 Afrooist made her debut solo exhibition at The Ritzy Brixton which included a live art performance ritual framed around a character she named Black Persephone in musical collaboration with Tanc Newbury and Siemy Di.
A mother of 2 children, she strives to be the change she wants to see in the world. She is Co-founder with Dirish Shaktidas of a project called Futureseeds and is currently residing in South West London.
Words by Wendy Carolina Franco, PhD
She her hers
A Body Other Than My Own
* This essay talks about the video of the murder of George Floyd.
When the day’s headlines about Covid-19’s devastating impact on the Black community were replaced with images of Black youth screaming next to burning cars, I reacted with fear. I was in full support of the protests but scared for the protestors. My 13-year-old twin sons felt that watching the video of George Floyd’s death was necessary for me to understand the rage in the streets. P said, “If you don’t see how he was killed, you are being a coward.” I replied that decades of seeing black people suffer changed nothing and only normalized seeing black bodies being abused. They chewed on that for a minute. My teenagers have plenty of complaints about me, but they respect my opinions on social and political issues.
I am a Dominican woman with a history of serial migration, meaning that my mother immigrated first, we reunited when I was twelve, and one year later, she was imprisoned for eight years for a drug-related crime a white person would have barely done time for, and was later deported. I grew up alone in New York City, dropped out of school. I eventually earned a Ph.D. in clinical psychology. Now I specialize in trauma, counseling mostly minoritized people.
“Look,” I told the boys, “watching someone being murdered can be traumatizing to the viewer, and for young people of color, like you, it is particularly harmful to witness racially motivated violence.” Such videos reduce a person’s life to the day they were murdered, I argued. I suggested they focus instead on studying the origins of systemic racism, and—this part is really painful as a mother–on learning how to behave to stay safe. P and F told me they had seen many people of color die, and that their bubble of racially diverse kids had also seen all the viral videos. F said: “I don’t know if it’s good or bad for me to watch these videos, but this is the worst one I have ever seen.”
Still trying to protect my mental health, I asked them to describe it to me. I don’t know about all twins, but my boys talk at the same time and always contradict each other–it’s infuriating. This time, there were zero contradictions. P noted that the police and Mr. Floyd looked so calm that he thought it was fake, then he suddenly got scared for George Floyd. F spoke of moments he thought someone was going to intervene but were stopped. They both described a slow realization that no one was going to help. The killer stayed on top of Mr. Floyd long after his body had gone limp. P concluded that if the officer had just gotten up, Mr. Floyd would have lived.
My face awash in tears, I had a knot in my throat. Avoiding the specifics had been a way of distancing myself from George Floyd’s murder. I still think that watching black people die is traumatizing for Black people and desensitizes non-Black people to their suffering. But the reality is that children are watching.
After my sons brought Mr. Floyd’s death to life, I looked for photos of him. A beautiful vibrant trio in a park summer outing came up. Wow, he was so tall and serious. He looked like a guy who kept his word. That little girl in his arms must have felt like God himself was carrying her. There was enough arm and chest for her to kick back and watch the world from up high. His partner was beaming, enjoying the circle they had created. It looked like a magnetic field, impenetrable and safe.
I decided to watch the video, once.
From watching the video of George Floyd’s death I learned that he was a survivor. Even in the most frightening and compromised state, Mr. Floyd had the wherewithal to control the instincts we all have. He did not fight, or attempt to run, or freeze. These responses to danger come from the most ancient parts of our brain. He mustered the focus to try to de-escalate the situation by reminding the man intent on taking his life that they are both human.
George Floyd said he was in pain, that he couldn’t breathe, communicating that he is human and like all of us will die without oxygen. He tried to calm the officers’ fears. He said he would comply with orders. He tried to adjust his body. He called out “Momma.” This dying man claimed his personhood by calling for his mother. He had profound attachments and a mother who loved him, and there is nothing more human than that. I don’t need to know how Mr. Floyd lived his life. The video of his murder showed his fighting spirit, his focus on surviving for his family, his humility, his dignity. He did not give up, but clearly understood what he was up against.
F knows what it’s like to not be able to breathe. He had pneumonia when he was eleven years old, and a young white doctor refused to take his complaints of difficulty breathing seriously. She said his lungs were clear and sent us home twice. I called my dentist, an old school Peruvian MD, who said, “GET OFF THE PHONE AND CALL 911.” My son was too weak to walk. He was rushed to the ICU where he remained for a whole week. They told me that he would have been dead in one day.
For the local protest, F made a sign that said, “I CAN’T BREATHE.” I was flooded with sadness. He was not copying the rallying cry this sentence has become, he does not know how Eric Garner died, and he was not thinking of the countless COVID-19 patients who suffocated to death, or of the air pollution our way of living creates. As much as he understands, he has no idea.
The pain of Black people only seems to bring about more pain. The Brooklyn protests we went to were completely peaceful and about 50% white, but Black and Brown protesters risk a lot more. They will be arrested and penalized more harshly than their white counterparts. Protesting also poses uneven health risks. Clueless celebrities and people who do not understand systemic racism claimed the coronavirus would be the ‘great equalizer’; instead we learned that racial privilege extends to levels of exposure to the virus and the body’s ability to fight the illness. The data on mortality shows that Black people die at three times the rate of white peers. Why do we accept so much black death?
Being the target of injustice creates a double bind, or a lose/lose situation. If you do nothing,
you suffer psychologically and emotionally, and if you fight back you risk further harm. Yet, I have to be hopeful. I see solidarity for Black people and a focus on action. I too come from pain. I can relate with feeling invisible, unimportant, and forgotten. But I will never know what is like to live in a body other than my own.
We naively think that our shared humanity is enough to experience empathy, but it isn’t, because of antiblack racism. We live in a society that assigns value to people’s lives depending on their identity. In this case, we have seen the repeated dehumanization and abuse of Black bodies, and for generations, we have labored to rationalize a world wherein skin color, gender and sexual identity, religion, place of birth and physical ability are risk factors for suffering and death. The human brain will distort reality to protect us from the idea that bad things happen to good people. As an example, victims of abuse, even in the most extreme cases, find ways to blame themselves. On a psychological level, having provoked the abuse preferable to the idea that something out of your control, like your body, can make you a target of violence. We make sense of systemic oppression by blaming the victims.
To undo lifetimes of mind-bending justifications of a racist system, we need action. Laws force people to adjust their belief systems. But we can go further and explore the barriers that keep us from seeing ourselves and our loved ones in the faces of Black victims of racist violence. Those barriers are constructs like “us and them or good and bad,” that keep us focused on our own suffering and desensitize us to the pain of others.
Procreate Project New team Members
We are beyond excited to welcome Mary Cork and Bianca Chu to the Procreate Project team.
Thanks to the Arts Council England Emergency Response funds via the The National Lottery, we are able to have new incredible professionals join the team.
Mary Cork – Creative Development and Programme Consultant
“ Though it can be an incredibly joyous and creative time in one’s life, the impact of motherhood on career development in the arts is undeniable. This is something that has affected me personally. Procreate Project is doing important work to create innovative programmes that support contemporary artists who are also mothers and I’m delighted to join the team to help them with delivering their mission to effect systemic change in the arts, cementing a much needed place for the topic of motherhood in current arts discourse.” – Mary Cork
Mary Cork has over 15 years of experience in both not-for-profit and commercial contemporary art. Her previous work has included developing, curating and delivering visual arts projects, and supporting arts organisations such as The British Council, More Than Ponies, Block Universe, Whitstable Biennale, Open School East, Auto Italia and Studio Voltaire.
Until January 2020, Mary was Head of Development at Wysing Arts Centre, and before that Director at both Pilar Corrias Gallery (2016–18) and The Approach (2011–16). She has lectured on BA Culture, Criticism, and Curation at Central Saint Martin’s and BA Fine Art at Arts University Bournemouth, amongst others, working with students through curating and professional development workshops, seminars and lectures. Mary holds an MFA in Curating from Goldsmiths, University of London.
Bianca Chu – Sales Development and Strategy Consultant
“I am delighted to be joining the Procreate Project team as sales development and strategy consultant. Procreate Project’s ethos and its work supporting artists who are mothers is urgent and important, now during these difficult times but also, always. As a woman in the art world, having worked in the art business for almost a decade, the imbalance and invisibility of women artists, in particular those who are also care-giving, deserves our attention and action. I look forward to working with Dyana, Paola and Mary on cultivating and growing the network of collectors and supporters of PCP and its artists, and being part of the team of this ambitious and multi-faceted organisation.” – Bianca Chu
Bianca is an independent curator and art consultant based in London. Previously the deputy director of S2 Gallery, the exhibition arm of Sotheby’s, Bianca curated and produced an extensive programme of exhibitions and publications, focusing on artists often perceived as on the margins of art history, aiming to grow their visibility on the secondary market through collaboration with galleries, artists, estates and institutions. Prior to Sotheby’s, Bianca was the Head of the First Open London auction and the post-war and contemporary department at Christie’s South Kensington. She is a member of the Ambassador committee for the Tate Young Patrons and advisor to the Kim Lim Estate.
We will be working with Mary and Bianca on:
– Reviewing and expand the support we offer to artists in our community
– Review our business plan which is subject to fundamental changes due to the COVID-19 crisis
– Work on organizational development activities and strategies to strengthen its longer-term sustainability and widen its social and cultural impact
– Pay artists to produce new work for a total of 10 commissions
– increase our online presence and grow the art sales and network for our online gallery/shop. Via this platform we will be supporting and featuring up to 40 artists
– secure the optimal strategic direction for the organisation
– implement and grow existing and new platforms