Baby Aanya

She is lying next to me on the couch, peacefully sleeping, like I should be. I’m really enamored this time. I was with Om too, and made a whole graduate thesis based on my new reality with him, but she is something special in another way. Like her name means, a re-birth, a new life, a renewal of all that is good and can be hoped for. We’re working on three months and a week of knowing each other in person, I feel like the meet and greet happened long ago.

The new body of work Nesting is closing this week at Palmer’s, its an uncomplicated collection of 16 drawings and 5 paintings all of the same bird. Only two drawings actually have nests, because lets be honest, its all about the bird, and the bird is me. Its like I took a bow and said, yes, I can do Mothering, its what I do and I’ve got it now, and then had another baby and packed in an art show, a new business and other various time consuming activities. I think I’m up to more than what normal people do first few months post-partum. Is that called working for yourself? The bird stands on the ground looking up into the stylized London Plain Sycamores like the ones on my street, Michigan Avenue, and although looking away and quite small, is the focus of the entire piece. There are only three colors to choose from, yellow ochre, prussian blue, and green earth, and the bird is only in grahite with a little touch up. I’m happy with the simplicity, I’m pleased with the extremely positive response to the work, I only wish the economy was on the up during my chance to plaster the gallery walls! Friday night I’ll close the event with Melissa Bond and a poetry reading about nests, birds, and whatever else Melissa wants to share. Its nice to find someone who is working with words the way I’m thinking about images. Looking forward to it!

 

New Blog, Continuing Research

The break between finishing this MFA show and now has been an unexpected one; I’ve tried 3 months of working as an artist and a stay at home mom (SAHM). Supported mentally by publications such as Mothering magazine, Brain Child, as well as lengthy discussions with other mothers, I’ve cultivated an idea that came in the midst of the final frenzy of Maternicity.

I am continuing my research into feminist views on motherhood, mothering, and what it means to become a mother. This new body of work will move its focus on my own role identification experience with accepting motherhood to include the larger, more universal themes of mother, focus on birth stories in particular, with an emphasis on the moment of birth itself. The new body may become one very large charted depiction of the timeline of many birth stories, probably overlapping and intersecting at significant points. I am considering the possibility of adding an audio component to the piece(s) as narrative interviews, probably edited for specific content and streamed into the gallery space where the visual art will hold much of the weight within the space. The materials are yet to be determined, however, I expect heavy line drawing influence through light textile/thread structures, probably continuing with hand processed fibers in reference to body fibers, all within a type of chart/pedigree type structure. The structure will be free within space, unless circumstances and materials end up forcing it to a large flat vertical surface.

Research for this project will require hundreds, if not thousands of audio recorded interviews of both mothers concerning their first births, as well as midwives for correct vocabulary and professional language and the transcription of all these audio materials. I feel it is extremely important to include a wide variety of ethnicities, cultural groups, economic levels, and ages to create a more accurate picture of modern births.

The aim of this body of work will be to accurately depict contemporary birth narratives in a visual (and possible audio) form. Justification for the project comes from an intense personal interest in birth narratives, a coinciding second pregancy and need for further personal exploration into the overarching themes of birth processes and the evolving definition of contemporary motherhood, the blatant runaway managed maternal care within the US health care system in particular, as well as the yawning gap between widespread perceptions of birth and actual realities.

The new blog can be found at www.birthnarratives.wordpress.com

 

Podcast Leah

A beautiful snowy morning, January 25, 2008. Dallas recorded our 15 minute interview sitting on the brick floor of the gallery just before shooting the show for documentation. Read/look/listen below.

http://montage-creative.blogspot.com/2008_01_01_archive.html

 

Artist Statement: MFA Final Show

Maternicity: The emotional component of the maternal role, specifically describing reorganization of identity from self to mother during the postpartum period.

For the first 9 months and then the following 19 months until now, I wanted to scream my experience, to tell everyone about this shockingly remarkable event that changed me forever, to shake the person standing next to me enough that they would feel the seismographic intensity of my new life paradigm shift. Instead, I spent 3 months quietly and methodically making paper from raw fiber, another year tying it all together, months collecting used diapers and dryer sheets, early mornings hand stitching quilts, sleepless nights in-between breastfeeding sessions printing lithographs, and generally obsessing over this drastic reorganization of my life. Creating my manifestation of maternicity, a natural pattern of narration.

This show acknowledges the fragility/stability of the human body, specifically in a maternal experience, nods to the excessive cultural codes of the feminine, attempts to decipher a personal paradigm shift, and follows it all by indexing physical and emotional work. Organized in variations of line and grid, the thousands of delicate attachments to hundreds of sheets of handmade paper echo the thousands of self evaluation sessions spent transitioning into this maternal role. Some works follow a diaristic documentary process indexing physical work. Others address only the intuitive remnants of emotions. All of the work draws conclusions about identity.

Giving birth to this body of work was like being reborn. I went into it one and emerged two, the person before and the mother after. Like a child, it is the product of process, the result of a long, slow process of minute developments, the drama of transition to delivery now a slightly discolored memory. I feel like I physically exude this deep physiological pattern of continuous subtle transformation; I’m slightly reshaped, slightly discolored, and after all this layering, possessed by a much greater transpersonal consciousness.

 

MFA Final Show

Maternicity: Forming Attachments and Drawing Conclusions
January 9 – 25, 2008
Opening: Wednesday, January 9th 6-9PM
Artist Talk: 6PM Room 158

Closing: Wednesday, January 25th 6:30-8PM
Artist Talk: 6:30PM Room 158

Gittins Gallery: Fine Art Building: University of Utah
375 South 1530 East, Rm 161
(The Art building is just Northwest of the UMFA)
Open M-F 10 AM – 5 PM

 

Title 2

On Becoming a Mother

Memoir no longer works as a structure. Records of events, emotions, feelings, incidents, overall attitudes, loathing, embracing, letting go, clinging, change. All part of the significant paradigm shift toward filling the role, finding self in the highly idealized yet gritty reality of what we call Mother. On Becoming a Mother. Do I need a subtitle?

 

On Children, Kahlil Gibran

And a woman who held a babe against her bosom said, “Speak to us of Children.” And he said: Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you. You may give them your love but not your thoughts. For they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams. You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday. You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth. The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far. Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness; For even as he loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.

From Chapter 4 of The Prophet, by Kahlil Gibran

 

Maternicity

Maternicity: Motherhood can be divided into two components: Emotional factors (Maternicity) and Physical care taking (mothering). The emotional factors: diagnosis for the emotional component of the maternal role. a synonym for related terms. Reorganization of a woman’s identity from woman to mother (considerably more complicated), the development of which indicates a high probability for the successful learned development of a healthy mother-child relationship. Women may have a high level of maternicity regardless of working full time Motherliness: bond, attachment, tie, affection, dependency

Mothering: physical caretaking: activities such as diapering, feeding, bathing, burping. a person can be mothering w/out experiencing the emotion that makes bonds the infant

Maternal: the role incorporating new attitudes, beliefs, responsibilities, and relationships, all revolving around a child, reorganization of the household
Establishing a relationship with the newborn:
1. Identification process: (usually begins prior to birth, intensifies during the third trimester of pregnancy.) desire to know sex, traits, establish personality and characteristics
a. Comparisons with preconceived notions:
1 fulfills, identification process facilitated
2 does not meet, identification process delayed
b. Reaching, or active holding, rather than passive holding
1a. Touch progression: confirms existence of separate person, index of how mother feels about her relationship w/child
1 fingertips, arms, skin-to-skin
2 palmar touch
3 chest positioning: usually left side (heartbeat, soothing, security of familiar sound)
4 eye to eye contact
a increasing frequency and duration= increasing maternicity

Adapted from Postpartum: Development of Maternicity, Susan M. Luddington-Hoe, American Journal of Nursing, July 1977

 

Mother Of Mine

  http://www.seattlefilm.org/festival/film/detail.aspx?id=16818&fid=13

Mother of Mine
Äideistä parhain
Finland, 2005, 111 Minute Running Time
Additional Countries: Sweden
Genre: Coming of Age
Language: Finnish, Swedish
English Sub-Titles

During World War II, ten-year-old Eero is sent by his mother to Sweden for his protection (recalling the 80,000 children sent out of the country during the war). MOTHER OF MINE depicts the emotional confusion of childhood and the difficult choices of women who try to do what is best.

My crit: Intriguing, gorgeous scenery, painfully slow as to mirror the passage of childhood time. Sympathies abound for both women, only after their real stories are known, shown through the discovery of the son. Why did I never know about the relocation of 80,000 children from Finland to neutral Sweden? Gut reaction: impossible, but I wish I could have been there to temporarily foster a few in my make-believe Swedish home.

 

ARM

Association for Research on Mothering:

The Association for Research on Mothering (ARM), founded in 1998, is the first international feminist organization devoted specifically to the topic of mothering-motherhood. Our mandate is to provide a forum for the discussion and dissemination of research on motherhood and to establish a community of individuals and institutions working and researching in the area of mothering and motherhood.

ARM, first and foremost, seeks to promote maternal scholarship, both at the university and community level, by bringing together interested individuals to share their insights, experiences, ideas, stories, studies and concerns about mothering and motherhood. ARM is concerned in both membership and research, to the inclusion of all mothers including First Nations mothers, immigrant and refugee mothers, working-class mothers, lesbian mothers, mothers with disabilities, mothers of colour, and mothers of other marginalized groups.

The Association’s mandate is to promote feminist maternal scholarship by building and sustaining a community of researchers interested in the topic of mothering-motherhood. The Director of the Centre is Andrea O’Reilly, e-mail aoreilly@yorku.ca. You can reach the Coordinator, Renée Knapp, at arm@yorku.ca.

http://www.yorku.ca/arm/index.html