Mother Mother
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Excerpt from email written February 2016 to the artists and writers volume one of Mother Mother:
Proposal: Mother Mother
In 2011, I was a participant in a residency in Banff, Alberta; my daughter could not stay with me. She
was one. I commuted between the residency and a place I rented in town for my mother, daughter,
and myself. The separation felt like physical pain. It was also intoxicating. Liberation from the tedium
of caring for a young child which allowed my own work to come first. I veered between extremes of
emotion with guilt as a constant. In response I made Mother / Mountain / Ghost. Standing in front of
a scenic mountain with a sheet over myself and my daughter (to be a mother and to be a mountain
and to be a ghost), I attempted to unravel the identity of motherhood. The performance underlined
existence and erasure, the doubling of known and unknown creating a space for something yet
unnamed.
Dedicated to three mothers: Rita Wilson, Catherine Keller and Libby McGrail.
In 2012, I was at a residency in Sackville, New Brunswick; my daughter could not stay with me.
She was three. I commuted on weekends to be with her at my home in Nova Scotia. Again, the
separation felt like physical pain. Again, it was also intoxicating. Again, I veered between extremes
of emotion with guilt as a constant. In response, I organized a Mother’s March through the town of
Sackville. My mother, daughter, myself and twenty participants, marched with hand lettered banners
proclaiming desire for expanded definition of motherhood. The banner I made for my mother and
I to hold read, FOR THE AMBIVALENT GLORY OF MOTHERHOOD.
My daughter is now five. Since she was born, friends, friends of friends, people asking for a friend
repeatedly ask the question of what it is like to be a mother and artist, and if one precludes the
other. These questions recognize that, on some level, the art world insists on a special brand of
parental invisibility. There is a pervasive assumption that parenting doesn’t fit with the persona,
or dedication, necessary to be an artist. Mother Mother is a publication comprised of mothers. On
one hand it marks as visible the act of being a mother. On the other hand there is no investment in
finding a particular theme or methodology. I am most interested in a compilation that articulates
some of the conflict and confusion of being mother, artist, lover, partner, sister, friend, et more.
I am writing to ask if you would consider contributing to this publication.
Best,
Sheilah
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How can I make the experience of my labor speak (my first, just seven weeks ago as I write
these words) and can the expression be visual? Elaine Scarry answers me: Physical pain
has no voice, she writes. It shatters all language. Is this the reason there is so little art about
motherhood and even less about the physical experience of laboring out our babies? I
thought, in the moments after delivery: this is what my work will be about from here on
out: not the experience of birth exactly, but the impossibility to account for bodily sensation
and trauma and entropy in words and pictures. Turn and face the strange rings in my head
as I feel you urge through me and into the world, too brightly lit for the both of us. David
Bowie, who died two months before you were born, wrote these lyrics while expecting his
first child almost half a century before. Feeling your wet and quick pulse − it sounded like a
horse pounding across land in the distance, now your stuttering cries have the same affect
− I thought of Thoreau’s Ktaadn, written deep in the Maine woods: Contact! Contact! What
are we? Who are we? (1848). I thought, with my eyes closed: Am I being born? I knew: I
will never be able to make artwork as good as this. Luke said, looking at him: Carmen, it’s
our nature and I knew just what he meant. I wept in motion. I was relieved to see you and
relieved the pain was nearly over. Would you reflexively know forever what I endured for
you and your body? (And would that knowledge hold us close?) Weeks later, I saw pictures
that you took and they looked nothing like my feelings.
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Hunters in the Snow
For every question posed, there exists a further question. To the question of figure:
ground. To the question of distance: touch. Of that which cannot be touched: sea, sky.
Every attempt at explanation fails; in this, all things are complicit. Human being
is complicit. In general agreement with things as they are, or appear to be.
Yes, to be alive is to be in general agreement with being alive. It is to accept that,
despite or even because of the things we do not agree with or fail to understand
we must keep on being alive; that it matters that we do. At least in a small and
personal sense, matters. To be alive is to accept the reduction of all or nearly all terms
to this “small and personal sense.” To say “at least” and for it to mean “enough.”
More than enough. For it to mean, “everything.” As it occurs in the moment you are
first born. When you are still complicit in the way that the last line of a poem is complicit
with the blank space of the page upon which it opens. In the way that the page is
complicit with its being turned, its turning. In the way that the turn is complicit with the
slight rustle of air, which—though unfelt, unseen—must have existed if the page has
indeed been turned, if the page has, indeed, been moved through the air. As it occurs in
the moment you are first born, when there is yet no cause, so that all is cause. When to
be alive is to be cause. Is to respond to every question with that—simplest—reply. When
living is still just a promise. That there will, and can be, to all of this, no resolution.
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Full Fathom Five
When she was two, and I was on sabbatical from teaching—and from Ohio, where we lived, where I
felt I was in exile from what I thought of as real life (which is to say life in New York, where I was from,
where I’d lived for the first three decades of my life)—I took my daughter, Grace, to a children’s production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” We were in New York then. My husband, a painter, had been
granted a studio in Tribeca, and we were bartering his skills at remodeling in exchange for a rent-free
apartment. Mornings, while I wrote, my daughter and her father painted together or built complicated block structures; afternoons, we visited museums and playgrounds; evenings, she and I played let’s
pretend: let’s be orphans, let’s be sisters, I’ll be the mama and you be the baby. We were enchanted creatures in a
forest. We were lost at sea.
“A Midsummer Night’s Dream” was the first play Grace ever saw. She had been listening to music in
every genre—heavy metal, hiphop, Hendrix, punk, jazz, San Francisco acid rock—since birth (before, if
she could hear it) and looking at art for almost as long. We’d spent so much time at the Met, that year we
lived in New York, she’d nicknamed all the abstract paintings in the Lila Acheson Wallace Wing, and if we
lingered too long elsewhere looking at seventeenth century Dutch still lifes or Quattrocento paintings,
she’d cry, Get me back to the twentieth century!
Now we sat side by side on a hard bench watching simplified complications ensue in an adumbration of
a forest. I kept a careful eye on her for signs that we should bolt—at any moment, I feared, she might
shout, Get me back to real life! But she was silent and attentive. Then Puck cast his spell and Bottom’s head
was swallowed by a papier-mâché donkey’s head and she gasped, stood up on the bench, grabbed my
shoulder—and when Titania began to stir, she shrieked, Oh NO! She’s going to fall in love with a DONKEY!
She was laughing and crying at once. I can’t believe it! she said. This wasn’t what she meant, I knew. She
meant, I believe it! She meant she was amazed she did.
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When Grace was three, back in Ohio, we read a children’s cartoon-style biography of Jackson Pollock.
There was a panel that showed Lee Krasner, Pollock’s wife, demanding to know what Jackson had done
with her egg beater—and in the next panel there he is bent over a canvas, using an egg-beater to fling
paint. One morning Grace asked for my egg beater—I didn’t have to ask her why. Her father and I covered the playroom floor with taped-together vinyl tablecloths, and for many days over many weeks, she
splashed and splattered and egg-beat and dripped paint on large sheets of posterboard we taped to the
vinyl. I’m Jackson Pollock, she told us. I am not me, okay?
Today, two decades later, she lives in New York (and I still don’t). At her senior thesis show last year, the
audience stood, they danced—they were shouting and laughing and crying all at once. I was crying too,
but not just because of what was happening onstage, or even just because I was so proud of her. I missed
her. I missed her already, even though we were, for the moment at least, in the same room. I had been
missing her for four years, of course—she was in school six hundred
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miles away—but now she was about to graduate and then there would be no pretending anymore that
she “really” lived with us. Soon, home would be elsewhere—soon she would be gone for good.
But also—I missed the child she’d been.
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I spend a lot of time—too much time—thinking of (just for example) the adaptation of “Charlotte’s
Web” we saw in Ohio when she was seven and its effect on her. The actor who played Charlotte would
soon become her first acting teacher, who would introduce her to Kabuki—which led a dozen years
later to traditional theater training in Kyoto—and to Shakespeare, starting with “The Tempest.” Now she
is working on her own production of “The Tempest” in New York, and she supports herself with parttime work looking after a little girl with whom she plays each afternoon and evening—let’s be fairies in
the forest, let’s be girls at summer camp, let’s put on a show. Her subway stop on the B line is its final stop in
Manhattan; it makes its first stop in Brighton Beach, where I was born, where my parents met and married, and roughly halfway between the start and finish is my old subway stop from when I was Grace’s
age.
I think about these things, but I don’t talk about them.
In March, for my sixty-first birthday, I visited her in New York. We went together to the Museum of
Modern Art. There is a Jackson Pollock show, and its about to close.
We linger in front of every painting—they are like old friends we haven’t seen in a long time. As we
stand before one of the first drip paintings, Grace bends to read its title. I think about the long-ago days
when she didn’t know or care what paintings were called, when she’d name them herself—Boom! and
Black Angry Storm and Red Green Fog.
She says, Mama, look.
The painting is called “Full Fathom Five.”
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Lines from “The Tempest.”
I can’t believe it, I say. But I do.
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2 - 3 - Laura Larson,
4 - 5 - Carmen Winant, Elsie Kagan, Mother and Child, oil on panel, 12” x 8”, 2007.
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- Elsie Kagan, Mother and Child, oil on panel, 12” x 8”, 2007.
8 - 9 - Jin-me Yoon, Intersection 5, C-Print, 63 1/2 x 81 1/2”, 2001.
10-11 - Laura Letinsky, Untitled #44, Ill Form and Void Full series, archival ink print, 2014.
12-17 - Suzanne Silver, Amira Silver-Swartz, Sivan Silver-Swartz, I Used to Steal your Crayons,
crayons and oil pastel on paper.
18-19 - Dani Leventhal and Sheilah Wilson, Love Letter, also for Kwong, digital images, 2016.
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- Johanna Skibsrud, Hunters in the Snow, 2016.
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- Adriana Kuiper, Flowerbed, mixed media, 24 x 30”, 2009.
26-27 - Karla Wozniak, Mountain Mama, watercolor, graphite and oil pastel on paper, 2016.
28-29 - Moyra Davey, Walk Write Friday, Walk, Write, Friday, 4 c-prints, tape, postage, ink, 2015.
Courtesy the artist and Murray Guy, New York.
30-31 - Leeza Meksin, Tits and Balls, flashe and watercolor, 2016.
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- Hein Koh, Selfie with Sculpture #6, digital image, 2015.
34-35 - Sarah Rushford, The Wee Little Woman, found text, digital collage, 24” x17”, 2016.
36-37 - Rachel Mason, still from Heaven, music video, 3 minutes, 2016.
38-39 - Almond Zigmund, Alternating Repeats, 12 x 21”, 2016.
Thank you to those who have contributed to this first volume so willingly, to my fellow Ortega y Gasset
members, to Jenny Kim for help with layout and editing and Canada Council for the Arts.
And always, Dani and Rose.
40-41 - Michelle Herman, Full Fathom Five, 2016.
42-43 - Susan Metrican, Untitled, color image, 2016.
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- Danielle Mysliwiec, Crow’s Nest, oil on wood panel, 18 x 18”, 2013.
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