Two children and three adults are playing on a mat of coloured tiles. There is a sofa behind them, and on the wall behind that is a photograph of a woman smoking a cigarette with her hand on a pregnent belly.

MOTHEROTHER:
The NewBridge Project

MOTHEROTHER, preview at The NewBridge Project. Photo credit Matt Denham.

There were two previews for the opening of MOTHEROTHER at the NewBridge Project: one from 1-3pm, where visitors were supported with dependant-friendly activities and extra pairs of caring hands to enable them to focus on viewing the exhibition, and another that started at 5pm. Coming from work, my initial visit was with ‘L’, my reluctant four-soon-to-be-five-year-old, not-so-fresh from after-school. We arrived early when it was still super quiet, and I negotiated a seven-minute look around the show, carrying all seventeen clingy kilograms of him, before Programme Director Fran Stacey offered us some Lego and the Reading Room to ‘settle in’ in. After multiple thwarted attempts to sneak away to look at artwork, it was obvious I would have to come back for a second visit to spend some proper time with the exhibition as each work demanded my attention, drawing me in, asking me to relate, to listen, to share.

Conceived by artist Sue Loughlin, MotherOther describes itself as ‘an inclusive and supportive collective for artists who are also caregivers’. Since its launch in January 2023 it has been running networking events, discussions, workshops and two artist residencies, supported by Lady Kitt, Dan Russell and Cheryl Gavin. There are eight artists featured in the MotherOther exhibition, curated by Loughlin: Hannah Cooke, Katie Cuddon, Sarah Maple, Kübra Müjde, Lauren McLaughlin (with Anna Oldfield, Ell Sinclair, Jessica Timmis, Leni Dothan & Medina Mukhayer), Sara Qaed and Kate Sweeney and a special screening of a live performance of ‘Milk Report’ by Conway and Young on 1st August.

L and I walk into a welcoming space, a table spread with paper for drawing, feedback and reflections. A stack of pamphlets created by Lady Kitt and their children, Finn & Ada, document an abridged version of ‘A Dialogue About This Exhibition’. I pocket one to read later, which I do, as well as listening to the recording on The NewBridge Project website, smiling at the exchange, inflections and sniggering. The barrage of interchanged questions is a refreshing way into an exhibition’s ideas and themes: ‘Can art be funny? Who’s the artwork made for? Is this art just all about women? Is it okay for artists to make art about their children?’. I’ve been thinking about some of these things myself and enjoy the prompt.

A brightly lit gallery space. In the middle foreground is a large painting on paper, suspended from ceiling to floor. The painting is a watery figure. Behind this on either side are sculptures on small wooden tables. there is a large painting on the far wall.
MOTHEROTHER, installation view at The NewBridge Project. Photo credit, Victoria Doyle.

The wall text reads: ‘the exhibition is not intended to represent the myriad of care and parenting roles across our creative community, but offers glimpses into some of the facets of mothering and motherhood’. MotherOther’s website defines mothering as a ‘non-gendered verb’. The wall text quote from American writer Alexis Pauline Gumbs, ‘the radical potential of “mother” [that] comes after the “m”’, begins to confront the ‘othering’ of motherhood full on, opening up a space to communicate facets of caring that are traditionally taboo within the art establishment. This space feels like a welcoming community in which we are invited to share a sense of understanding and solidarity. I can’t help but wonder though, who is left out and who is unintentionally alienated by the ‘m’? I feel torn between this thought and the societal exploitation expecting mothers to do it all.

On entry to the exhibition space, we are met with a huge double-sided painting on paper, ‘Bath and Squeeze’, 2024, by Kate Sweeney. Measuring around 1.2m across and 2.8m high, like an architectural pillar it blocks and diverts our body. One side of the work is reminiscent of entrails, umbilical cords, birthing, miscarriage and bodily fluids, as we look down onto the artist’s body and other, indiscernible forms. There is something more-than-human emerging, transforming through the meeting and pooling of mordants and homemade dyes that use elderberry and iron in an effort to ‘fix’ that insatiable sweet and vinegary smell of a young child’s head. I know Sweeney and know this work explores her experience as an adoptive mother. This lived experience feels messy, sticky, bodily and intimate. The painting on the reverse shows a transformation into a graceful entanglement of bodies, attachment strengthened through skin-to-skin contact.

To the left of the space is a larger-than-life photograph, ‘Self Portrait with Pocket Square’, 2021, by Sarah Maple. The artist, dressed in a baby-blue silk suit and brown silk shirt meets our eyes in what feels like a provocation. Between red-painted lips, a cigarette lingers, evocative of a 90s pin-up oozing sex appeal. The artist’s hand, fingernails painted red, holds a rounded stomach, pregnancy-played-against-beer-belly, beneath which the blue silk flies are open. I’m aware of the artist’s eyes, and yet I uncomfortably scan their detailed attire. The dress code queers the position of pregnancy: what if this were a man?

A baby and an adult are smiling as they look at a white plaster sculpture on a small wooden table. There are other people in the gallery space chatting and looking at art.
MOTHEROTHER, installation view at The NewBridge Project. Photo credit Matt Denham.

Maple’s second work, ‘Holding My Child at Arm’s Length’, 2022, a towering, C-type poster print, pasted the height of the gallery walls, is even more commanding. I’m trying to meet the artist’s stare, and indeed the baby’s, who is held firmly at a distance by the artist, this time wearing a black suit. There is a stillness and a heavy suspension of time, a revelry in discomfort. Without doubt this work speaks to the invisible and unenumerated labour of parenting. It feels angry. The distance I feel seems to correlate with the void I remember between the body and the brain, the intimacy and the toil.

I move onwards to Katie Cuddon’s sculpture ‘Behind Mother’s Eyes’, 2020. A blue form sits heavily on a trestle table. At first glance, Cuddon’s work is recognisable as a stomach with legs, but as I draw nearer I feel uncertain: is the shape at the top a baby’s body, or some heavily exhausted breasts? Does it show hollow thighs or eyes, vacant and worn out? The surface of Cuddon’s work, pummelled, growing and collapsing at once, shows the felt knowledge of the maker and mother coinciding. The eyes are of the skin, instinctual and haptic. As much as the sculpture itself, I am taken in by the hefty table on which it sits. Cuddon shuns a neutral white plinth for a more practical support. Stained, dripped, splashed and bashed, it is a layered record and document of art practice and the process of tending to artworks, paralleling acts of caring.

Cuddon’s second work in the exhibition, ‘My Body My Name’, 2021, another ceramic, is painted sherbet yellow and pink, a powdery, sweet pallor. Again, the form hints strongly at the body, this time a head and bust strangled by a snake-like hollow coil or necklace. I want to sit down alongside her, to relate to this mother, to poke my finger in the inscribed ‘m’ ‘u’ ‘m’. Fittingly it’s just a shell, the identity is lost.

I now settle down to watch Sweeney’s ‘To Be Two’, 2023, a short 3.25min collage of video, animation, poetry and sound recordings. It is sensual and poetic, speaking of ‘mud and pink’, ‘elderberry, beetroot, clay and cherry blossom’. The dialogue makes us live the tastes and smells and touch of lips to ‘soft peach’ skin. The work reads as both an extended moment and a memory of elapsed time that we are asked to dwell in before it is gone.

There is a large photo pasted onto the gallery wall, from floor to ceiling. It shows a woman with medium length brown hair and wearing a suit, holding a baby at arms length.
MOTHEROTHER, installation view at The NewBridge Project. Photo credit, Victoria Doyle.

On the neighbouring wall, Kübra Müjde’s painting ‘Lebanon’, 2017, echoes the scent and colours of cherry blossom. Blue, white, black and moonlit, it shows two bent and crouching figures, one holding a child, their eyes closed and downcast. This is a scene of immense sorrow. There are no tears, but the eyes appear to be brimming. The brush strokes are applied with haste, wet colours merging to describe buildings, barbed wire and women’s bodies. They appear to be at a fence or border, mourning something beyond the painting’s frame. I imagine the painting documents the 2017 dispute between Lebanon and Saudi Arabia, like a newspaper sketch rendered at a large scale. It transports me to the border of a place of conflict, of which there are several right now, in Abyei, Armenia and Azerbaijan, the Gaza Strip, and Ukraine. This is a very different and important view of motherhood, and of humanity, and one that makes me feel very grateful and privileged. I am aware there is a whole world around each artwork, and so many more meanings manifest.

I move around to Sara Qaed’s digitally printed drawings of other mothers living in crisis, created in 2024. I looked at this with L, who takes things so deeply and seriously and seemed shaken and confused. It crossed my mind whether I should be showing him, and then I thought about the children who are witnessing horrors far worse in reality. There is so much unavoidable pain in these works. They are unapologetically brutal and horrific: bodies bleeding and brutalised, pregnant people getting bombed, humans felled like trees, babies imprisoned from utero. I talked about how they made me feel and asked how they made him feel. I talked about freedom to speak, the grief on both sides, the blood on our hands and the mockery of ‘Great’ Britain. There is so much here, and I gratefully signed up to Qaed’s special discussion event, ‘How to open a conversation with children in schools about Palestine’, where I listened to women talk of their experiences and desire to also celebrate Palestinian culture creatively with children through singing, stories and food.

Lauren McLaughlin’s ‘War on Women’ (from series 2019 – ongoing), moves the political back to the personal, which is of course political too. A simple wire coat hanger is bent to make fallopian tubes and uterus. Lit from above and hidden around the corner in the screening room, strong shadows make the work feel secretive and foreboding. The work deals very simply with the taboo of abortion and the policing of women’s bodies. Whose bodies are they?

Two children and three adults are playing on a mat of coloured tiles. There is a sofa behind them, and on the wall behind that is a photograph of a woman smoking a cigarette with her hand on a pregnent belly.
MOTHEROTHER, preview at The NewBridge Project. Photo credit Matt Denham.

I turn to see Hannah Cooke’s video and sound works, ‘Ada vs. Abramović’ and ‘Ada vs. Emin’, both 2018, two ten-minute video works with sound on a rolling loop. I sit down as I feel like I’m being asked to endure the slow-mo blinking stare of the artist, baby in arms as she sits and stares at us, either in the context of a recreated artwork of Tracey Emin’s ‘My Bed’, 1998, or Marina Abramovic’s ‘The Artist is Present’, 2010. In both there is a discreet show of attentive attachment as the artist enters and settles the baby onto her breast, before facing us. The baby, Ada, is close-mic’d and suckles loudly. I scour the detail surrounding them in ‘Ada vs. Emin’ (Absolut Vodka, Marlboro Lights, a pill packet, KY Jelly, Polaroid Camera, chips and tomato ketchup). The densely populated mess of Emin’s unmade bed takes on new meaning and, as with Maple’s work, it highlights the judgments aimed at mothers who smoke, or drink, or fail to live up to the endless expectations placed upon them.

I am used to speaking to breast-feeding mothers, but the work reminds me of a time when I wasn’t, and of a time when I was in this position myself, particularly as a very new mum and sensing the discomfort of others. By boldly situating herself and her child as performers in these two iconic artworks, Cooke not only challenges our judgements and voyeurism, but also defies exclusion of herself and the subject matter of parenting.

A gallery space with a large bright window. There are five people looking at art works and talking. In the foreground is a blue sculpture on a wooden plinth structure. On the wall in the background is a large painting of a landscape at night.
MOTHEROTHER, preview at The NewBridge Project. Photo credit Matt Denham.

A screen in the Reading Room shows ‘A Single Mother Artist Moanifesto’, 2023, by Lauren McLaughlin and Anna Oldfield, asking: ‘Do you have a rising sense of fury when someone says “I couldn’t do what you do”, or “I just don’t know how you do it all!”’. It feels like a space to vent if you’ve felt unrepresented, and calls for solidarity and understanding. Several books offer further reading and exploration of ideas beyond the show.

As I come out of the exhibition, back into the welcome space, I scan the visitor comments and feedback. Wondering how the show, which to me confronts the motherhood experience with a raw tenacity, is experienced by prospective mothers. I am pleasantly surprised to read a comment from one: ‘a space to hold me and my busy thoughts’. I smile at a comment, ‘proud of my Mum’, presumably from the kid of curator and MotherOther instigator Sue Loughlin. I am in awe of how Loughlin has collated support from multiple organisations and brought together communities to create a supportive space and programme of events for the past year. Alongside other exhibitions such as Hettie Judah’s Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood, I feel that we would never have seen a show like this four or five years ago.

It’s refreshing to see a diverse spread of experience and backgrounds in this exhibition, and in the crowds who attended the preview, not all of whom were parents. There is no way that, given the size and scope of The NewBridge Project’s gallery, this show can ‘do it all’ and represent every experience. I feel conscious of writing a review and critiquing it in that context. On top of the invisible and unenumerated labour of parenting, the artist/curator-parent can’t possibly win. Still, I want to lean into Loughlin’s question of who is missing. I know primary carers who do not identify as mothers who feel excluded from the recent rise in mother-centering art projects and wonder how they can be brought back in, to silence the ‘m’? I also wonder about what parenting holds beyond babies and small children, and indeed coming full circle, parenting our parents? I think there is more left to be said, but I think this exhibition does a solid job of proudly starting that conversation.

Rosie Morris is an artist based in Newcastle upon Tyne.

MOTHEROTHER runs at The NewBridge Project from 7 June – 10 August 2024 

This article is supported by The NewBridge Project.

Published 15.07.2024 by Lesley Guy in Reviews

2,376 words