Thursday 19 January 2017

Live Art and Motherhood

Delighted to be included in this publication from the LiveArt Development Agency...
Live Art and Motherhood - a study room guide
researched and written by the artists,activists and academics Emily Underwood-Lee and Lena Šimić.

Mothersuckers Project

Mothersuckers is a project arising out of the collaboration between Zoë Gingell and Eve Dent, drawn from their personal and artistic responses towards motherhood and pregnancy, which have developed, into ideas for a new approach to their usual practice as artists.

There is a particular focus on the reappraisal of one’s own body, as a dual conduit of connection and separation, of oneself in relation to an ‘other’ imagined yet real being, growing within and the psychological and emotional connections involved within an essentially shared physical relationship.

"Since our meeting, we have found an exciting and enlivening point of discussion of ideas around the pregnant body, the psyche/self and the breast as a symbol of both connection and separation, questions around a relationship that whilst being mutually functional involves an emotional and psychological evolution through the medium of a physical journey.”


mothersuckersproject@gmail.com

photos by Thomas Bartlett


Mothersuckers Project forms as an organisation

At the end of 2011 the Mothersuckers Project formally became an arts organisation with the following aims:
1. to enable artists whose practice has been or is currently substantially affected by the experience of parenthood.
2. to provide a point of contact whereby ideas and work related to the above can be discussed and promoted.
3. to contribute to long term studies of work being made about the subject in relation to art debate.
4. to act as a model of good practice for other areas across Wales and further afield.

Breastcups

'Breastcups' - a collaborative piece of video, installation and performance was first shown in November 2009 at Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff. 
"Small cup and Large cup"
Two video pieces that play alongside each other. Close ups of a hand expressing breastmilk into a tiny tea cup and a normal sized tea cup. The work plays in a humourous and ironic way with the breast as a container of many meanings; with the biological normality of breast milk verses current cultural norms. The breast, the milk, but no baby - just milk for our tea.
"Breastcups"
An installation/performance . A cafe scene is set, tables for audience members. At one table sits a mother and her baby. The waitress brings out strange objects and vessels including lacy molded ‘breastcups’ which the mother fills by pumping her breastmilk through a tube into the vessels. In "Breastcups", the maternal breast becomes many vessels, with the medium and fluids of milk a kind of connective currency initially between Mother and Baby, then between self and other, performers and audience.

HOUSEMADE