Art and Motherhood

"If the woman artist has been trained to believe that the activities of motherhood are trivial, tangential to main issues of life, irrelevant to the great themes of literature, she should untrain herself."

Alice Ostriker

The above quote opens the introduction to The Divided Heart: Art and Motherhood by Rachel Power, a book recently loaned to me by a friend. A book which after reading the opening quote I promptly stopped reading, not for disdain but for the sudden realisation I had finally found the words that have been churning around in my brain for several months expressed so well by another.

And during that brief pause before endeavouring to devour this book (which of course I had to put down not long after the attempt in order to attend to my children - so still reading!) I asked myself, "If this is how I feel why is it I am keeping two blogs, one for the art, one for life when the two are so intimately connected for me. Must everything be so compartmentalised?" (edit - certainly not the most poignant question I could have asked myself, but an outworking of conflicting feelings about my children and art, definitely.)


No answer yet, but it is on my mind.

Along the same vein, Dana of Leililaloo is currently posting a series of interviews with artist-mothers she calls, "Balancing". I'm finding them quite encouraging, perhaps you might too?



I certainly don't mean to alienate anyone who may not have children, but to me as a mum the issues pondered in Rachel's book and Leililaloo's interviews are real, affecting my art making and child-rearing (quite often whether the making part gets to happen or not).

The top image is in my studio, which coexists rather ungracefully as a living room. The other two images are of Peter's Quilt: for my husband on Father's day. Still somewhat in progress. Made from Old beach towels that belonged to his dad (Peter lost his father when he was 16), terry-towel nappies (diapers) I used as nursing cloths when my girls were breast-feeding, a towel we received as a wedding present and a snippet of the towel I brought with me to Australia 10 years ago, all tied to a pieced sheet of wool flannel. A large section of the wool belonged to Peter's grandma. For some reason terry-towelling and wool flannel go together in my mind. Put together somewhat roughly and quickly, a bit raw and uncomfortable yet warm and nurturing. Like these early years of child-rearing.