By: Courtney Kessel
The exhibition, Motherhood Mediated, co-curated by Odeta Xheka and myself, celebrates the transformative nature of life with a child that permanently alters one’s reality. This paper examines the twelve artists in the exhibition through the lens of the cyborg and the chimera to illustrate the generative and hospitable nature of the subjective maternal in art. My own research and art practice have investigated, performed, and embodied subjective aspects of motherhood for the past 15 years. This work has felt rebellious and, at times, like a protest, as motherhood, maternity, and specifically, the experience of the mother as subject matter in art have all but been excluded. While gender gaps remain ever-broad in museum permanent collections, and representations of motherhood are even more absent, the artists in Motherhood Mediated tackle motherhood as a positionality, staking a claim on the importance of this life-changing experience.
At the 2016 colloquium, Mapping the Maternal: Art, Ethics, and the Anthropocene, Deirdre Donoghue challenges fixed notions of maternal identity, instead proposing that the maternal exists as a fluid and ever-evolving state defined by “radical hospitality.” Drawing from the medical concept of microchimerism—a phenomenon in which fetal cells pass across the placenta wall to become part of the mother’s body—Donoghue reimagines the artist-mother as one who thrives on exchange, connectedness, and shared creation. She describes this maternal positionality as “generative and performative, social and material, affective and political,” one that is constantly emergent and responsive to shifting material and temporal realities.1This concept rejects the idea of the artist as an
isolated “solitary genius” and instead emphasizes a dynamic and relational practice marked by mutual influence and interdependence.1
Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto (1985) similarly challenges rigid boundaries, biological determinism, and patriarchal ideologies.2 Haraway critiques the “border war” that defines social control over production, reproduction, and imagination, urging us to find pleasure in the “confusion of boundaries” and take responsibility for their construction. Like microchimerism, Haraway’s cyborg metaphor muddies distinctions between self and other, body and technology, encouraging a feminist model of kinship and affiliation rooted in hybridity and transformation.
Embracing these ideas of maternal transformation and hybrid subjectivity, artists in Motherhood Mediated employ photography, video, and performance to explore the complexities of maternal identity. Danielle C. Wyckoff’s Carrying I offers an intimate portrayal of the artist’s changing body during her third trimester. Through daily videos documenting her baby’s movements, Wyckoff captures fleeting yet profound moments of transformation. Stills from these videos are meticulously arranged in a grid, evoking a calendar of abstract, colorful forms that resemble phases the moon or color field paintings. This rhythmic documentation of her body’s changes recalls Mary Kelly’s Antepartum (1974), a black-and-white film depicting the artist’s pregnant belly as a near-abstract landscape of movement and growth.3
Nanna Lysholt Hansen’s Dear Daughter/Organic Cyborg Stories (After Donna Haraway) explores the intergenerational transmission of feminist knowledge through embodied performance. Her work is “a continuous and serial exploration of flexible and fluid material in the process of becoming;” a microchimeric absorption of texts exploring shared knowledge production and feeling.4 In this ongoing series, Hansen’s face is obscured, and her visibly pregnant body (2013) is cloaked in ethereal blue light. This haunting costume marks her body as both specific and universal—an anonymous vessel open to shared narratives. As she performs excerpts from Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto, her voice becomes the primary presence, further blurring boundaries of identity and authorship. The “I” of the performance replaces the “cyborg” from Haraway’s text. The performance series, unfolding across a decade, reflects the artist’s evolving relationship with motherhood, weaving together her experiences of pregnancy, birth, caregiving, and sexuality.
Artists Emilia White, Kim Hopson, and Odeta Xheka use video to explore seemingly opposite ends of absurdity and agency. The humor in White’s video performance, Lemons, conflates the ideas of sexy, beautiful, and/or maternal, as lemons are squeezed from inside a body wearing a leopard print jumpsuit. A performance piece that is mediated by post-production 4 video editing shows pockets that act as orifices from which lemons suggestively ‘pop’ out or are inserted into. This two-minute performance shows the mother at play with herself, which, in the absence of a child, appears absurd.
Kim Hopson’s Panic 2 offers a striking contrast. In this video, Hopson lies prone on a bed while two small, giggling children repeatedly jump and walk across her body. The video’s careful editing overlays multiple images of Hopson, amplifying her discomfort as tiny feet step on her head and torso.
While playful at first glance, Hopson’s gaze signals a deeper vulnerability—a cry for support that acknowledges the strain and exhaustion of caregiving, particularly as a disabled artist navigating this dual role.5–6
Stitching Thyself explores maternal agency through a fragmented, multi-dimensional self-portrait in Odeta Xheka’s video collage. The layered visuals juxtapose delicate lace patterns with the artist’s busy hands stitching a canvas in the background. This intricate composition reflects the simultaneous roles Xheka embodies: mother, artist, curator, writer, gallery owner, philanthropist, and advocate. By weaving these identities into one complex visual narrative, Xheka reveals the unseen labor and emotional complexity of maternal existence. This next section could be titled, Still Life with Child, not because of the literal presence of the child, but because of the extreme presence by 5 In a longer paper, I would address the role of the gaze and the history of the male gaze, the subsequent female gaze, and the potential for a maternal gaze.
which the child is felt. These three artists include their children in their work and/or use their home as the set for their photographic practice. Shweta Bist and Caroline McAuliffe each create highly staged photographs with symbolic colors, objects, and textures, speaking in a specifically maternal visual vocabulary. Surrounded by books and study materials, Shweta Bist’s Sh*t I Do: Test Prep shows the artist at the table with her young daughter.
Both subjects look directly into the camera lens; this gaze becomes a position of power as Bist: “insist(s) on acknowledgment of her labor and its value. For her, the domestic sphere is a site for resistance.”7
The artist-mother is clothed in a dress made of Indian rupees, and the daughter has large pink blossoms over her chest and face, representing puberty or innocence. Bist’s strategic use of the books Of Woman Born and Maternal Thinking underscores her resistance to devaluing domestic labor, asserting the intellectual and emotional depth of maternal identity.8
Caroline McAuliffe’s Cars & Trucks is a portrait of the artist on a bed with toy cars and trucks taking over half of the space. Lounging back, partially seductive, partially menacing, the masked figure seems completely comfortable surrounded by these toys. Centered above the figure’s head is the nested image of another of the artist’s photographs.
The two figures in this other image appear to be the artist 7 Shweta Bist, Artist Statement, and her wife, who often collaborates with McAuliffe, harkening back to a less encumbered time without a child. Now, the bed, big enough for two, is covered in toys and taking up the space where another person might be. While photography is the method for documenting the textile works made by McAuliffe, the masks allow the wearer to perform for the camera. McAuliffe’s masks serve as a way to “hide in plain sight,” offering protection from recognition but also the ability to be whoever the wearer wishes. In her artist statement, she writes, “I feel mother non-conforming, unsure of how I am a part of and embody the role, and yet I twist and turn myself into whatever is needed for my child daily.”9 Here, McAuliffe calls attention to the transformative nature of motherhood.
The third artwork represented in this grouping is my semi-annual performance, In Balance With. While differentiated in medium and material, this performance piece has always acted as a portrait of our lives together at that particular moment. Performed almost once a year since my daughter was 5 years old, each iteration shows a child who is one year older with different hair, clothes, and items on the seesaw. This portrait also stays true to my relationship with my daughter and shares the intimate experience of witnessing change over time. Household objects play an important role in the staging of this piece such that their absence becomes felt even more. In the 2020 performance, we performed during the COVID-19 pandemic for the camera only, livestreaming on YouTube.10 This piece was vastly different, with nothing on the seesaw but our shoes and iced coffees. We invited online viewers to text or DM us, and we read their comments and remarks out loud to verbalize the support and love for our community.
Making work with their children or child’s things demonstrates a subjectivity that borders on resistance/protest in putting the mother and her experience front and center. The objects and staging in Bist and McAuliffe’s photographs, and the items placed on the seesaw in my performance, speak to a very specific maternal positionality. The work honors the fluid and expansive dimensions of maternal identity while simultaneously questioning the social and cultural boundaries that seek to contain it.
Artists Frances K. Denny and Cristina Molina create artworks resembling protective spells, blending maternal care with symbolic imagery. In Denny’s, What will you plant with the moon?, the artist uses yarrow, representing protection, and hellebore for rebirth suggestively mixed in with a child’s handmade bracelet; metallic gold confetti glistens in the light; and a roll of gold mylar is placed diagonally in the background. A large piece of granite anchors the composition with all things placed atop a sea of dark green velvet. Part of a series of 27 photographs, called Spellwork, each photograph carries a secret message, spell, or wish. In Denny’s project statement, she shares that the “studio set becomes an alter; the act of creation an incantation.”11 Denny acknowledges this position stating, “The images conjure a subjective duality of artist and mother; the triumphant, deathly dance of disparate roles merging into one.” Here Denny acknowledges the chimeric in the roles that the artist/mother must play.
Like Denny, Cristina Molina’s Ice of the World casts a mesmerizing spell through meditative texts blending English and Spanish narration with poetic visuals of flamingos, ocean waves, and matriarchal figures. Dressed in similarly patterned garments printed with fan palms, these unmistakably related maternal figures embody continuity and care, linking generations through acts of nurturing and protection. Coupled with the dreamlike qualities of magic realism, the video and photography of The Matriarchs project are deeply ritualistic and influenced by 17th-century memento mori paintings.12 Both Molina and Denny’s work is steeped in symbolism, like a spell that uses specific ingredients to be carried out effectively or using floriography to send secret messages, these artists conjure maternal protection through the juxtaposition of specific objects.
The third piece in this grouping is once upon a dream, my three-minute film that warns young adults of the deceptions of social media.13 The scene opens with a close-up pan of what looks like a mess of clothing, dirty dishes, Xmas lights, and soda cans strewn about the floor. Colorful lights swirl in a disorienting way as the camera closes in on a foot, then a bare stomach with a belly button piercing, and manicured nails holding a cell phone. As the scene unfolds, a precariously hung mobile of knives and protective symbols is suspended above this young woman. All along, an abstract version of the song “Once Upon a Dream” from Sleeping Beauty plays in the background. The film ends with a final reveal (spoiler alert) of the whole scene as a set on a stage, further dismantling the illusions that represent what is seen on social media.
Collectively, these artists embody maternal subjectivity through their exploration of chimeric shapeshifting, radical hospitality, and the complex emotional landscape of caregiving. Their works celebrate the fluid, expansive nature of maternal identity while challenging the social and cultural frameworks that attempt to define it.
The final two artists selected for Motherhood Mediated embody a sort of hope for the future. They create speculative, forward-thinking work, encouraging the next generation to dream big and fight hard. In Cayla Skillin-Brauche’s series, Illusions & Portals, we witness photographs of the artist alone amidst vast land and water scapes. Wearing bright colored or reflective fabric, Skillin-Brauchle’s luscious photographs capture a performative moment where the artist’s body marks a portal to another place. She is at once with the landscape and illusion into a world absent of other humans – a speculative fiction for a better place. It’s like she is saying, “Join me! Just grab my magic fabric and come along!” This place is no doubt the perfectly envisioned utopia in which the artist would raise her child. In proximity to the changes that motherhood brings, she writes in her statement that these performances are an attempt to “begin to understand concepts of transformation, flight, transfiguration, and flexibility.”14
Lise Haller Baggesen introduces the phrase “the mother-shaped hole in contemporary art and discourse” in her book Mothernism.15 Part of a larger nomadic project, the Mothernism Care Package includes a flag emblazoned with the words “Put the Mom in MoMA!” and a signed UMAMI (United Mothernist Artists Manifest Illuminisms) poster that functions as both a protest flag and a manifesto, urging the maternal’s inclusion in all aspects of artistic practice and discourse.16 Echoing Donoghue’s emphasis on the generative collaboration that motherhood brings, Baggesen asserts that “Mothernists play in the expanded field between criticality and generosity.” “Mother,” she reflects, “is both a noun and a verb; I regard my practice as a sourdough, a gestation of material, out of which individual works, texts, and shows are wrought, while the mother remains active.”17 Lise answers the call put forth by Donoghue that “mother-artists, mother-writers, mother-scholars, mother-thinkers” need to reevaluate the maternal and redefine it from within.18
Ultimately, Motherhood Mediated underscores that maternal subjectivity is neither singular nor static—it is a fluid, multifaceted identity shaped by the interplay of transformation, resistance, and care. By drawing on the metaphors of the cyborg and the chimera, these twelve artists reveal how maternal experience dissolves conventional boundaries, embracing hybridity, collaboration, and exchange. Their works illustrate that the maternal can be both deeply personal and radically political, simultaneously grounded in everyday domestic labor and expansive enough to address broader
Figure 2- Dear Daughter/Organic Cyborg Stories (After Donna Haraway), 2013-2015
Figure 3 – Emilia White, Lemons, video, 2022
Figure 3 – Panic 2, video, 2024
Figure 4- Stitching Thyself, video college
Figure 5 – Test Prep (Sh!t I Do), photography, 2024
Figure 6 – Cars & Trucks, photography, 2023
Figure 7 – In Balance With, performance still, FAB Gallery, 2016
Figure 8 – What will you plant with the moon? (Yarrow, Hellebore), photography
Figure 9 – The Matriarchs, video, 2016-17
Figure 10 – once upon a dream, film, 2022
Figure 11 – Illusions & Portals, photography, 2019
Figure 12 – Mothernism Care Package, 1 flag (silver gutta resist and fabric dye on polyester scarf) + 1 UMAMI poster (silk screen, double sided, signed and numbered 23/50), 2023
References:
1 Deirdre Donoghue, “In Search of The Maternal: Towards Microchimeric Bodies,” paper presented at Mapping the Maternal: Art, Ethics, and the Anthropocene, University of Alberta, 2016,
2 Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (Routledge, 1990). 3 Mary Kelly, Antepartum, 1974, Video loop transferred from Super 8 film, 1:30 minutes, https://www.marykellyartist.com/antepartum-1973.
4 Lysholt Hansen, “Matrixial Tongues: Dear Daughter/ Sen_sing_Inannainanna,” 73.
6 See Disabled Caregivers’ Utopia, https://www.kimhopsonstudio.com/video-work
8 Of Woman Born by Adrienne Rich, and Maternal Thinking by Sara Ruddick
9 Caroline McAuliffe, Artist Statement, https://www.carolinemcauliffe.com/statement
10 Courtney Kessel, In Balance With, 2020, Performance, 52:22 minutes,
11 Francis K. Denny, Spellwork, https://www.francesfdenny.com/PORTFOLIOS/SPELLWORK/28/caption
12 Cristina Molina, The Matriarchs, https://www.cristinamolina.com/thematriarchs 13 Courtney Kessel, Once upon a Dream, 2022, film, 3:03, https://courtneykessel.com/artwork/5099601- Once%20Upon%20a%20Dream.html.
14 Cayla Skillin-Brauchle, Portals & Illusions, https://www.caylaskillin-brauchle.com/portals
15 Lise Haller Baggesen, Mothernism (Green Lantern Press, 2014), https://thegreenlantern.org/product/mothernism/.
16 Lise Haller Baggesen, UMAMI, https://lisehallerbaggesen.wordpress.com/mothernism/umami/
17 Lise Haller Baggesen, Artist Statement, https://www.lisehallerbaggesen.org/artist-statement
18 Donoghue, “In Search of The Maternal: Towards Microchimeric Bodies,” cultural narratives demonstrate that maternal subjectivity is not confined to the private sphere but is instead an evolving, creative force that continually reshapes artistic practice and reimagines relationships between self and other.
Resources
Baggesen, Lise Haller. Mothernism. 2013. Museum of Contemporary Art,
[https://www.lisehallerbaggesen.org/menu], [https://www.lisehallerbaggesen.org/mothernism]. Accessed 1 Aug. 2025.
Baggesen, Lise Haller. Mothernism. Green Lantern Press, 2014.
Donoghue, Deirdre. “In Search of The Maternal: Towards Microchimeric Bodies.” Paper presented at Mapping the Maternal: Art, Ethics, and the Anthropocene, University of Alberta. 2016. https://newmaternalisms.ca/colloquium-overview.
Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge, 1990. Kelly, Mary. Antepartum. 1974. Video loop tranferred from Super 8 film, 1:30 minutes. https://www.marykellyartist.com/antepartum-1973.
Kessel, Courtney. In Balance With. 2020. Performance, 52:22 minutes.
Kessel, Courtney. Once upon a Dream. 2022. Film, 3:03. https://courtneykessel.com/artwork/5099601- Once%20Upon%20a%20Dream.html.
Bist, Shweta. Sht I Do: Test Prep. 2025. [https://www.shwetabist.com/], [https://www.shwetabist.com/shit-i-do]. Accessed 1 Aug. 2025.
Denny, Frances K. What Will You Plant with the Moon? 2025. [https://www.francesfdenny.com/], [https://www.francesfdenny.com/PORTFOLIOS/SPELLWORK/16/caption]. Accessed 1 Aug. 2025.
Donoghue, Deirdre M. “In Search of The Maternal: Towards Microchimeric Bodies.” In Inappropriate Bodies: Art, Design and Maternity, edited by Rachel Epp Buller and Charles Reeve (Demeter Press, 2019).
Hannah Thomasy. “A Stranger to Oneself: The Mystery of Fetal Microchimerism.” The Scientist, https://www.the-scientist.com/a-stranger-to-oneself-the-mystery-of-fetal-microchimerism-72022. Accessed 27 Jul. 2025.
Hansen, Nanna Lysholt. Dear Daughter/Organic Cyborg Stories (After Donna Haraway). 2013. [nannalysholthansen.com], [http://nannalysholthansen.com/?page_id=303]. Accessed 1 Aug. 2025.
Hansen, Nanna Lysholt. “Matrixial Tongues: Dear Daughter/ Sen_sing_Inannainanna.” Periskop – Forum for Kunsthistorisk Debat, no. 24, Dec. 2020, pp. 62–77. DOI.org (Crossref),
Haraway, Donna Jeanne. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge, 1991, pp.149–181.
Haraway, Donna Jeanne. Manifestly Haraway. United States, University of Minnesota Press, 2016, Pp.5–80.
Kessel, Courtney. In Balance With. 2025. [https://courtneykessel.com/],
[https://courtneykessel.com/section/261291-In%20Balance%20With.html]. Accessed 1 Aug. 2025. McAuliffe, Caroline. Cars & Trucks. 2025. [https://www.carolinemcauliffe.com/], [URL]. Accessed 1 Aug. 2025.
Molina, Cristina. The Matriarchs. 2016-[https://www.cristinamolina.com/, [https://www.cristinamolina.com/thematriarchs]. Accessed 1 Aug. 2025.
Ruddick, Sara. Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace ; with a New Preface. Beacon Press, 1995.
Skillin-Brauchle, Cayla. Illusions & Portals. 2019. [https://www.caylaskillin-brauchle.com/], [https://www.caylaskillin-brauchle.com/portals]. Accessed 1 Aug. 2025.
Wyckoff, Danielle C. Carrying I. 2018. [https://daniellewyckoff.com/], [https://daniellewyckoff.com/carrying-1]. Accessed 1 Aug. 2025.
- JourMS - 