On Yielding: A conversation on Motherhood and the Artist as Mother

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It’s 7.30am on a Wednesday morning. I’m sitting upright in bed, still unshowered and unchanged and in my dressing gown. Surprisingly it’s already been quite a productive morning. I’ve been up and about since dawn, sneaking out of the room while my baby slept in the bed and going about my tasks. Now though, it’s a different story. He’s fussing and squirming, making a terrible whining sound that he’s just learned and which I’m learning means either ‘I’m tired’ or ‘I have a sore tum’ or both. He’s a bit colicky this morning and I’m trying very hard to get him down again. I have a plumber waiting for me outside who travelled over 7 hours from Lusaka, our capital city, to be with me this morning for a big job of laying pipes. Now however, is a terrible moment to be here. Still in my dressing gown and pinned down to the bed while my baby tries to feed and sleep, unsuccessfully with his dreaded wind, I try to juggle calling the plumber and then my husband on the phone, while my seven year old pops his head in to tell me the plumber needs me, all the while my baby fusses and wriggles like a very heavy fish atop my breast trying desperately to sleep. One-handed I try to co-ordinate the day on my phone (not too close to his head, hold it away from his body, don’t let him see the screen, as like a little tsoko he catches the phone screen glare and follows it around) I need him to sleep so I can finish the tasks that I started before he woke earlier, to get the day going. Don’t forget to send off that document for the upcoming art show. The dog is inside the bedroom too and wants to get out. Lying in this position isn’t working for baby’s sleep so I get up and open the door for the dog and think maybe I should go and speak to the plumber. There’s a good burp (I now have baby sick all down my arm and a bit in my hair) Remember to tuck that boob back in, don’t want to scare him off poor man. Everything these days is an exercise in juggling and making the most of the scantily available time between feeds, naps, changes and play in this transitional time of a four month old baby.

8.45am and he’s finally down, phew. He’s going through a bit of a clingy phase where he wants to be ON me constantly so I have to be very creative about how I can put him down without him waking up. Please, don’t wake up! Bang, bang, bang in the distance means the builders are here - I’m renovating my studio to make it a bit bigger, I recently sold a couple of paintings to fund the project - which means I’ve got to get up and showered and teeth brushed to really get the day going. Not to mention breakfast. Thankfully my seven year old is quite self sufficient these days, when he’s not at school. I better go and check that he’s eaten.

11.45am and the juggling act continues. Baby again firmly ensconced on my breast for a nap and lunch is on the boil on the stove. Feet up while I sit here until he’s awake again. Where was I. Oh yes - Motherhood and the Artist as Mother. Something which I have been really learning this second time around is the concept of Softening. Softening, allowing, opening, yielding. All attributes of The Mother or the Feminine. A dance of surrender into transition and times of change, and allowing myself to flow within these transitions. It hasn’t been an easy or fluid learning to begin with. Little Sami (number 2) came along unexpectedly, a 7year age gap between my two children. Being in my fourth year of independent art practice before falling pregnant with Sami I felt I had really tried to ramp things up a notch, in terms of production, output, expansion, getting representation, making connections. I was looking to scale up and start making a business out of my practice. And then out of the blue a positive pregnancy test. Pregnancy slowed things right down again, or at least changed the frequency of my momentum, especially at the end when I was heavy and fed up. I tried to achieve as much as I could during my pregnancy; a smattering of group shows, pulling together a solo show with all the energy I could muster at 8 months pregnant, and laying solid foundations with a ‘proper’ website design and portfolio for marketing which was months in the making. And then I had to stop. Birth came, and with it those beautiful, liminal, non-stop postpartum days, especially with two kids this time around - school and school runs and lunch boxes and laundry didn’t stop, even though I had just had a baby. The great juggling act began anew. I had my hands full, but still I went into the studio. Without the pressure of a diligent practice (I had been in a groove of being in the studio for a few hours every day, even if I wasn’t ‘productive’ - just sitting and looking and thinking and journaling were sometimes all I could manage, but the process was nourishing of creativity) I found there was spaciousness to explore and open up a little bit, look at things a bit differently, and - miracle of miracles - to even dab a bit of paint at times, when Sami was asleep in the carrier or quietly lying on the sheepskin on the floor. I have even managed to complete a couple of works since Sami was born. They have been extremely rapid, in-the-moment works with the little time I have available, but perhaps that’s not a bad thing for this phase I’m in as it’s a sharper, more intensive focus I have within these parameters of time management. (How I long for the days to come when I can get lost in a work without the thought of time or making lunch or school pick ups). 

I can’t help but feel that a woman’s art practice, most especially a mother’s art practice, has a wholly different structure of its own, and it should be held as existing outside of the mainstream art paradigm, and judged as such; not as ‘less’ in any way, or ‘irrelevant’, rather as ‘more’ somehow, with its own innate rhythms and flow. The structure is designed around art-making in snatched moments of intense focus, with little sticky fingers always close, and being always needed, and always having a snack or a water bottle or a plaster handy with eyes in the back of your head and extra-sensory hearing; it is formed around the heart of motherhood and its constant demands. I find it interesting that a lot of celebrated women artists choose not to have children, which they believe would be ‘disastrous’ for their career. There is a conversation on ‘values’ embedded here, the values of the greater art world and reception to one’s work, and our ability as artists to make a living within the often constrictive parameters these values create; and if these values are in fact our own or those created with more emphasis on one gender over another? - but this is a conversation for another time. I do wish though that there were more mother-led, woman-led institutions, galleries, curators; structures and communities that could nurture and celebrate the mother in her practice - art by and for and about the Mothers; perhaps this does exist, I just haven’t found it yet.

Back to softness. And opening. What a beautiful, beautiful energy of The Mother (as archetype). What a way to approach one’s work and life and all its facets, not just mothering children. What a beautiful lesson it is to learn to surrender - yield into this time, this phase, that will soon pass and change again. Surrender to change. Surrender into letting go - of structures and practices and timelines and schedules we make for ourselves, of targets to reach. Let them go. Just be with your baby, your children, in this moment. Let it be more fluid. Adapt to this time, and the time after that. It’s ok if you don’t meet that goal. So I tell myself. Sometimes it’s hard - exhibitions coming up and deadlines to meet, after a night of 3 hours of sleep and two sick children. I do love seeing how Softness is beginning to pervade all of my life, most especially with regards to my art-making. There’s a new energy in the studio - a flowering of something, a blossoming of the roots and foundations that have been laid with devotion in the last few years. I do still struggle with limitations that cramp and distort my work, namely the isolation that living out here in this remote corner of Zambia brings - how I ache for community of like-minded individuals, for art stores close at hand, for inspiration from bustling life, for gatherings - but all that is about Integrity of one’s work in a very Virginia Woolf sense (I’m currently reading ‘A Room of One’s Own’ very slowly) - and this too is a conversation for another time.

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