Sculptor Barbara Hepworth once said that: “A woman artist is not deprived by cooking and having children, nor by nursing children with measles (even in triplicate) – one is in fact nourished by this rich life.” I have long admired Hepworth’s work, and her ability to work alongside her children. Hepworth also said that “being a mother enriches an artist’s life”. I don’t think this is entirely true.
Women in the art world face a motherhood penalty, where they experience a drop in income. Male artists, on the other hand, have a bump in their income when they become parents. This inequality means that mothering is sometimes seen as a setback to creativity.
In my book (M)otherhood: On the Choices of Being a Women (2021), I discuss how mothering has also at times been conceived as a homogeneous, mundane experience, with its edges and intersectional aspects smoothed out – too “domestic” a notion to be perceived as “high art”.
I have found that when you try to talk about this death of the individual self as you gives birth to a new human being, or the annihilation of what once was in order to raise a child, you are demonised. Guilt, anxiety, conflicts between our own desires and society’s demands from women, and our own internalised conflicts and ambivalence, are rarely documented. Motherhood is idolised.
The struggle between the self before motherhood, and the unpolished version after becoming one is not something we often see in literature or media. Novelist Rachel Cusk writes in her memoir A Life’s Work (2001) that after her daughter’s birth, her “appetite for the world was insatiable, omnivorous, an expression of longing for some lost, pre-maternal self, and for the freedom that self had perhaps enjoyed, perhaps squandered”.
Acts of Creation takes an exhaustive and incisive look at over 100 women artists who have created art representing their experiences of mothering and care-giving, from joy and grief to ambivalence. While Madonna and the Child was a popular subject in many of the religious imagery and paintings, Judah tells us that it wasn’t until the 20th century that artists dared to use their own experiences of motherhood as a source of inspiration, in all its messiness and chaos.
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For the full article by Dr Pragya Agarwal visit The Conversation.