Acts of Creation: on Motherhood at DCA
- Room to Be
- Jul 13
- 3 min read
It was always going to be interesting, wasn’t it? An LGBTQIA+ trans affirming, progressive group attending an art exhibition on motherhood – a subject so steeped in traditional values and formidable inflexible notions of gender and womanhood you’d think by its very nature it would exclude the trans experience. Mauragh, our tour guide, was quick to disperse any concerns, navigating us to the queer artworks that literally sang in one case of a different experience of bodies and babies and motherhood.
One quote from Liss LaFleur and Katherine Sobering’s They Can’t Steal My Joy taken from interviews of LGBTQ+ people in the USA struck a deep tone in me.
[…] the entire shape of my body changed,
like a stretched watermelon
At first, I was dysphoric
about how
my hips got bigger
my body got softer
But pregnancy helped to confirm
What I knew from a young age,
Which is that I’m not a woman.
On the opposite wall was a photograph of what looked like a man holding his baby, the newborn’s tiny hand clutching at his chest hair as they both slept. This photograph is of intersex artist and activist Volcano who looks beyond gender binaries and into queer family life in the MaPa Del series. MaPa is the name they have chosen as a parent.
I was pleased that this exhibition was pushing at boundaries (just as art should!). Mothers as creators, mothers in their daily grind, mothers grieving, mothers celebrated. Admittedly as I looked around, I realised I was longing to see a representation of a trans woman as mother. Sadly, a longing unfulfilled.
I also found myself seeking artwork that represented motherhood and adoption – something that is woven into my own family identity. I went to our tour guide Mauragh who hmm’ed before warning me there was something in ‘Loss’. They took me to a piece by Su Richardson called Heartstrings, a stitched mixed-media and textiles artwork which included a birthday card and bib. A friend had given this card and bib to the artist explaining that as a pregnant unwed teenager she had been placed in a mother and baby home. Her daughter was put up for adoption ten weeks after birth. Crocheted teardrops and hearts were stitched into the fabric to represent the loss of the mother and the loss of the baby. I felt this sadness, yet I was left with the question what of the mother who adopted the child? What of her experience? Was there joy?
It was not lost on any of our small cohort who attended the tour that everyone present was in fact childless. Not a single sprog had been popped between us. But this in itself raised interesting conversations around the taboo surrounding an active decision not to start a family, or of personal experiences of being parentified children, or of being young and curiously unaffected by the images and artworks seen because they were unrelatable to known experience. This latter conversation I found particularly interesting as it turns on its head the question from the introduction leaflet: How does the image of motherhood change when the artist is drawing on lived experience? What becomes visible? Yet as viewers of the artwork it is our own lived experience which dictates what we are able to see.
Big thank you to DCA for offering Room to Be a tour of Acts of Creation: on Motherhood as part of our Inclusivi-T programme. Thank you Leo for being so warm and welcoming and Mauragh for a tour of the art collection and both for being on hand to answer any questions. Great art. Great coffee. Great chats.
