Bio
Dr Laura Bissell is an Athenaeum Research Fellow and Lecturer in Contemporary Performance Practice at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. Laura co-edited and authored: Performance in a Pandemic with Dr Lucy Weir (Routledge, 2021), Making Routes: Journeys in Performance 2010-2020 with Dr David Overend (Triarchy, 2021), and Bubbles Reflections on Becoming Mother, (Luath, 2021). She is External Examiner for the MA in Contemporary Performance Practice at the University of Salford and has previously been External Examiner for the BA European Theatre Arts (Rose Bruford College). Laura’s research interests span contemporary performance practices; including technology, ecology, rewilding, interdisciplinarity, matrescence, feminist performance; and performance and journeys.
Abstract
Matrescence, coined by the anthropologist Dana Raphael, is defined as the process of becoming a mother. The term describes the physical, psychological, and emotional changes experienced during the significant transformation that occurs. In this becoming, there is also a sense of unbecoming, of the “irreplaceable clarity of the borders of the self” being blurred or eroded (Baraitser, 2009, p. 49). This article explores matrescence as simultaneously becoming and unbecoming through analysis of two case studies of performance works made by Scotland-based mother/artists in response to their experiences of matrescence during the COVID-19 pandemic. Laura Bradshaw’s Matrescence (2022) and Stephanie Black-Daniels’ Position & Attachment (2022) explore becoming mother in relation to particular outdoor sites through the lens of maternal performance-making (Šimić & Underwood-Lee, 2021) via diptych film works.
Julie Phillips claims that parenthood can feel “chaotic in all its self-loss and self-discovery” (2022, p. 15), but this paper argues that it is in this transitional and fluid state that a new creative maternal subjectivity can emerge. This article acknowledges the lineage of mothers who have sought to make visible their maternal labor and experiences through artistic practice and contends that the COVID-19 pandemic created specific parameters for art-making for mothers. These performances to camera, made with and for communities of those experiencing matrescence visually, convey the oscillation between multiple and synchronous versions of motherhood through the form of site-specific diptych films. In doing this they reveal depictions of maternal subjectivity as both a becoming and an unbecoming.
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